[bpd1069]

I would like to see a major player accept bitcoins as a method of payment.

Just imagine for a moment, Google accepting bitcoins as floating currency, to be used in its Google Play service, or with its Android devices with NFC enabled Google Wallet. That would blur the line between digital currency and digital/real goods and services.

[iheartmemcache]

As a developer who's been following (albeit not too fastidiously) the progress of Bitcoin since it's emergence, I still have no idea how to accept Bitcoin payments. Is there something like authorize.net (or better yet, Stripe) for this? Bitcoin API bindings for the languages du jour would help adoption I'm sure. Though, maybe there are libs out there already and I'm just not aware of them

[radarsat1]

Have you actually searched? There are a few solutions, although I'm not sure if any are accepted as the "one true way."

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Bitcoin_payment_systems

Basically it just comes down to generating an address for the customer and checking if a payment comes in.

Personally I wish I could pay for a lot more stuff using bitcoin, so I wouldn't have to keep giving out my credit card number to every website I want to buy something from. (I haven't dealt with paypal in years so I usually end up using my CC directly.)

Problem with btc of course is that once you've sent the money, it's gone, and there's no recourse if there was some kind of transaction problem, or the vendor decides not to acknowledge receipt.

[Animus7]

As a developer who's actually implemented this, I can say that the hot frameworks do have good libs for it -- and the bitcoin daemon has a trivial JSON RPC interface for which you could easily write whatever bindings you like.

And as amazing as Stripe is, getting working Bitcoin payments is even easier: generate key, show to your user, and query your daemon for payments.

[codexon]

Download bitcoind and learn to use the json interface.

When a buyer comes, generate a new wallet for them. Poll the wallet to see if payment comes.

That's how you accept bitcoin payments.

[foxhill]

generating a new wallet for every transaction is a bit wasteful, you can however just create a new payment address, and watch for payments on that.

if you create a few hundred receiving addresses, then you can keep the wallet (and hence private key) offline, as all transactions are public, and minimise the risk of having funds stolen (as we've seen a lot of places lately getting hacked and having their accounts drained..)

[codexon]

Yeah that's what I meant. Generate a new address for each payment.

[wmf]

People seem to be building their own or using Bit-Pay (2.69% fees; interesting).