Website integration for bitcoin

I’ve been working on a project inspired by a suggestion (and the offer of bounty 😉 ) over from another thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39.msg2065#msg2065). I thought I should stop derailing that thread and start my own project thread.

Basically, the idea of the project is an easy way for websites to integrate bitcoin payment. How it works is the user runs a website on their local machine, which is only accessible to them, then when the shop wants a user to pay some money, they simply send them to this local site, which handles sending the money and then redirects back to the shop site to finish the transaction.

So at the moment, I have a test of this running on my PC, visiting this URL:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/BitcoinSalepoint/LandingPage?continue=http://www.google.co.uk&paymentname=testaddress&address=1DoMXge6kToHZN8m4B2my43anCPbD4rJgE&amount=0.25

will simply send 0.25BC to my laptop from my PC, and then redirect me to google.

My todo list: -> Add some stylesheets for prettiness -> Add a confirm/deny button -> Add a way to communicate to the shop if the transaction succeeded or failed (mostly done) -> Look into packaging the program up into a simple executable which you can run instead of bitcoin, and it will run in the background and kill itself when the bitcoin process dies.

Suggestions (and donations) very welcome 😊

you could still create a new address for any transaction, if only one person knows that address, it’s pretty obvious where bitcoins came from.

true that you can’t get a list of all transactions from JSON yet, but from received credits by addresses, or labels, no need to know about generated coins on a payment-system, or about sending, when your system is only supposed to accept payments.

It’s a good temporary solution, and the only drawback I can see is that it requires a different/separate install, as opposed to just being something server-side. Granted, I can’t come up with an alternative either, but it IS a bit of barrier-to-entry for some people.

[Deleted] Quote from: martin on July 16, 2010, 02:09:09 PM

It is, I hope that ultimately this is just a proof of concept, and once it’s shown to work it can be integrated into the client (using the same port and URLs).

nods It’s a good initiative, and ANY development in the interest of bitcoins right now is good development.

I’ve been trying to encourage someone to write and release some sample Python code showing the recommended way to do the typical accounting stuff, but to no avail.  It would be nice if you didn’t have to re-invent the wheel like you’re doing here.  Search on getnewaddress and you should find a thread where I gave a small fragment of sample pseudocode.

Thanks Satoshi, I found those threads. However, those threads seem to be addressing the server side as far as I can see. I’m trying to address the client side of the problem by presenting a webpage to the user with a simple confirm or cancel button like paypal, that way the user doesn’t have to switch to the bitcoin client to send payment.

You sound like you want to be integrating with the https://www.mybitcoin.com/ guys.

Isn’t the actual sending better handled by the BitCoin interface itself? There’s been some talk on here about a URI schema for BitCoin (similar to the idea used by apps like Spotify/iTunes) that allow a link to launch the BitCoin interface pre-filled with address/amount information. It could be web based, but that opens up all kinds of attack vectors that need to be secured - possible to do, but personally I’d feel better seeing the BitCoin UI pop up asking for confirmation knowing that some XSS attack isn’t going to steal my coins 😊