decentralized deflationary API for merchant pricing

[skittixch]

Hey all. I had an idea that might be useful for merchants to start accepting bitcoins as money.

It's an api or standalone application that store owners can run to effectively turn their bitcoins into recordable cash, easily and beneficially, as well as tracking their growth.

The system would record how many bitcoins they got for what they sold vs how much the bitcoins were worth at the time of sale.  That way, when someone makes a purchase online, it's the for exact same amount as it would have sold for in USD (or other currency).

Easy to read graphs show them how much money they've got available in their wallet, and how much it's growing by riding the bitcoin economy. As they make more money, some of them are going to start buying things with bitcoin, and the whole goods/services economy would experience the rapid growth it desperately needs.

Let's say you could order groceries, or electronics, and instead of paypal, you'd choose something like "bitpal", that would accept the bitcoins, alert the merchant that an order had come in, and logged the transaction at the highest bid (taking depth of bids into acct) in USD.  The merchant would then have control over when they cash out. They could simply get their money from a market like mtgox (but not limited to mtgox) right then, or they can save it and see if it grows in value.  It could be advertised as a method of deflationary insurance.  If USD goes bottom up, at least your company has made an investment in a currency that operates with different rules.  This would mean that bitcoin could potentially move into the mainstream with an economically viable purpose.

I think as long as store owners can easily track their money, they're going to be more open about using a service that offers a very positive track record in valuation.  It's got to be a standalone, easy to use application. These are business owners, not computer nerds.  As far as scalability goes, I think something like this used on a wide scale could make our economy even more valuable.

thoughts?

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[davux]

I think it's a great idea. I'd love to see it implemented.

[ne1]

Me too, what would be required to write it?

[ne1]

Maybe this is something that could be added to the wordpress e-commerce shopping cart.  yeah, just thinking a historical exchange price to purchase chart would be awsome.

[2weiX]

Maybe this is something that could be added to the wordpress e-commerce shopping cart.  yeah, just thinking a historical exchange price to purchase chart would be awsome.

+1
i would so LOVE to build a little wordpress "shop" that accepts only BitCoin as a hobby and further the cause (it would be me selling my gold/silver coins, mostly). however, updating the prices sucks unwashed goat-ass.

if there was a way to make [shop-plugin] make the following, I'd be one happy camper:

a) take the price of something (gold-price, $XAU)
b) look for the vwap of the last X (three?) hours of $BTC-trading across Y exchanges
c) maybe apply some minor math to it (like [$XAU/31,11/$BTC]+0,5BTC)
d) put that shit right next to my krugerrand

and then log in the whole shebang, send the BTC to my safe.wallet.dat (there needs to be the option to supply a list of x BitCoin-Adresses the plugin uses to send the funds to make it less vulnerable), sends out an email with order confirmation, KABOOM! BUSINESS!

[ryepdx]

Hey, if you'd like a platform to experiment on, I can get you set up with a development install of Bitcoin Pouch on my server. I think your idea would work really well with what I'm trying to accomplish with Bitcoin Pouch. At present I'm trying to get some local vendors to accept bitcoins and would like for them to be able to use Bitcoin Pouch as a way of accepting payment without having to wait for confirmations. This would dovetail nicely with that.

The URL for the live server is https://bitcoinpouch.com/
There's a JSON-RPC API available at https://bitcoinpouch.com/api/bitcoind/ as well. Rough documentation can be found at https://bitcoinpouch.com/api/bitcoind/browse

There is also a version running on testnet at https://test.bitcoinpouch.com/

Source code for Bitcoin Pouch can be found at https://github.com/ryepdx/bitcoin-pouch