After thousands of years, our financial system has finally come full circle.
Imagine being able to sell any digital good you own for any amount of money, no matter how small, in a way that was never before possible with the Internet.
The creator of StrongCoin has developed just that: a micro-payment system that will let you sell photos, artwork, music, code, documents, books, or anything else that exists in a digital form. The Internet finally has its lemonade stand.
Check out a demonstration, right here.
Suddenly, we can all be merchants and entrepreneurs that do not rise and fall at the whim of a payment processor. We will not be subject to chargebacks, fees, withheld earnings, or any other of the dozens of hurdles that Internet businesses normally face.
It's so simple, and so important.
How is this revolutionary?
ReplyDeleteDue to the time between sending payment and payment confirmation, I can imagine a scenario where you send the btc, lose the page/connection, and wind up paying for a product you have no way of retrieving. I don't know how that problem can be addressed, but I imagine it can be a significant one. Currently waiting 7+ minutes for the page to give me my purchased item. Will report back on what I find.
ReplyDeleteAs expected, after paying the requested amount (plus fee, which increased total cost by 50%), waiting nearly 1 hour for 6 confirmations, and checking the page periodically for some sort of activity, the page did not change, nothing was given to me, I had no way of proving that I sent payment to the merchant, and I am left with less bitcoin and nothing to show for it. Do not use this demo/software. It appears to be a streamlined method of taking people's bitcoin a few cents at a time. I recommend that you reconsider your strong support of these strongcoin people until they get their act together.
ReplyDeleteThere is currently a similar project underway as part of MultiBit called MultiBit Merchant. This will offer a *full online shop*, for free, that handles payments in bitcoins. See GitHub here: https://github.com/gary-rowe/MultiBitMerchant
ReplyDeleteIt's currently pre-alpha, although a demo will be shown at the European Bitcoin Conference in Prague (25-27th November 2011).
@LightRider, the demo should have given you an instant download from zero confirmations.
ReplyDeleteIt's still at the early testing stage but if you contact me via the strongcoin contact page I'll refund your losses.
Strongcoin has returned my losses. I apologize for asserting that they are intentionally scamming people. However, there are significant issues that need to be addressed in my and similar use case scenarios. Thanks to them for addressing my problem quickly, and I hope they continue to develop innovative solutions for the bitcoin community.
ReplyDelete0/confirmed payments can be faked if the exploiter finds a method to send transactions to your node directly, and the same transaction to a fast mining pool but with a different receiver.
ReplyDeleteAnd I didn't get any page changes after sending the bitcent required for payment and waiting for 2 confirmations...
I wouldn't worry about accepting small payments on only the announcement. It takes way too much effort to fake an announcement to be worth it for payments less than 1 BTC, probably for anything less than 10 BTC as well.
ReplyDeleteIf the merchant is accepting a larger payment, then it's wise to wait for a confirmation. In some cases it would be wise to wait all 6 of them if it's a very large payment (buying a car or a house with BTC).
@Anonymous: definitely wait until you've received the transaction from more than one node. Or when you receive the transaction, send it to all the nodes you know, except one, and wait for this last node to report the transaction to you. Faking that is not simple, and probably not worthwile (financially) with micro payments.
ReplyDelete