The Internet Archive would like to take donations and sell some swag for bitcoins via our wordpress blog. There are a number of quality third-party plug-ins we could use, but we are dreaming of a simple system that has no third parties involved.
Goals:
- Minimal engineering time to set up,
- No third party involvement if possible for privacy and simplicity reasons,
- Straight forward process for our front-office staff to fulfill and track orders,
- Easy to add a new offering,
- A plug-in that others could use to add this to their blog,
- Open source so others could build on it (we use agpl-3).
Our idea is to have a form we can stick at the bottom of any page asking for shipping information or whatever, and supplying a Bitcoin address and QR code for them to send to, and a “submit button”. The user would then see an order confirmation page, get an email confirmation.
The website would get an entry in a tab delimited file written to our wordpress world and an email alert being sent that a new order came in. The tab delimited file could be used by a front-office person by importing into a spreadsheet– super simple.
The bitcoin addresses would rotate through a set of addresses, maybe 1000 of them, that we generated from bitcoin-qt and then put in a file on our WordPress world. This way we can check to see that the address that someone said they would send to got those coins at about the time they said they ordered. We realize this has potential problems (like if we get a flood of over 1000 orders in short order, or if someone hacked our wordpress and substituted different addresses), but it has the advantage that our wallet would be on a front-office person’s computer like it is now.
Any ideas on this, or anyone up for helping do it?
Watch out, a “wallet… on a front-office person’s computer” may not be an advantage, especially if it collects a non-trivial sum! Often front-office computers are the least secured of an organization – and Bitcoin wallets are a juicy target for malware/break-ins, essentially like a large amount of cash in a top drawer or tip jar.
For cross-reference, the approach you’ve described is very similar to what the Bitcoin wiki ‘LazyAPI’ page outlines: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lazy_API
Good point on computer security.
-brewster