I have registered the domain name bitcoinexchange.com and will start
coding the service sometime soon as a nice leisure activity. I'm
envisioning a simple Google-like interface with no registration and
only two texts fields on the front page, where you insert the amount
of money you wish to trade, and either your PayPal address to buy
dollars or bitcoin address to buy bitcoins. On the next page you'll
get a new bitcoin address for sending the coins or a check code for
the PayPal transaction text.
PayPal is good for the beginning - it's simple and has no startup
costs, but later on I might accept credit cards also.
Do you still need the maintenance account? It's ok if you do, but
change the password to something else.
Bitcoin stuff
Private email with Martti Malmi (sirius-m) · 6 messages · from 22 December 2009 · with Satoshi Nakamoto, mmalmi@cc.hut.fi
Read in Satoshi Mail Archive source
Thanks for creating the maintenance account, it would have been
impossible to do all that without it. I'm really always going to need
it. OK, I changed the password to a 20 character random password.
That's a good domain. People rarely type domain names anymore, they use
autocomplete or click links on search engines.
I need to make a way for you to programmatically get new generated
bitcoin addresses. Either that or you could have them send to your IP
address, but then you have to rely on them to put the order number in
the comment.
When generating the new address, there can be an option to add an entry
to the address book associated with the address, so the received
transaction will be labelled. I kinda hid the labels after early users
found them confusing, but it would be very helpful for this application.
You have to widen up the comment column to see them.
Are you going to manually review and enter orders, at least to begin
with? I sure would.
I'm thinking I should move the UI in the direction of having the user
ask for their bitcoin address when they want one. "give me a bitcoin to
receive a payment with". I suppose next to the send button, there would
by a receive button, you press it and it says "here's a new address to
use, here's the button to copy it to the clipboard, do you want to label
it?" and maybe some explanation about why you shouldn't reuse addresses.
Or maybe just a "New Address" button next to the address box that you
should hit each time to change it.
mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote:I have registered the domain name bitcoinexchange.com and will start coding the service sometime soon as a nice leisure activity. I'm envisioning a simple Google-like interface with no registration and only two texts fields on the front page, where you insert the amount of money you wish to trade, and either your PayPal address to buy dollars or bitcoin address to buy bitcoins. On the next page you'll get a new bitcoin address for sending the coins or a check code for the PayPal transaction text. PayPal is good for the beginning - it's simple and has no startup costs, but later on I might accept credit cards also. Do you still need the maintenance account? It's ok if you do, but change the password to something else.
I need to make a way for you to programmatically get new generated bitcoin addresses. Either that or you could have them send to your IP address, but then you have to rely on them to put the order number in the comment.
I'd also need at least the command line tools to check if coins have
been received and to send coins. It would require some way to
communicate with the Bitcoin process running in the background. I
don't know how that should be done, maybe with something RPC related.
It would also be great if the background process was non-graphical -
the VPS on the current service level doesn't have enough memory to run
the X Windowing environment, unless I come up with some ways to free
memory.
Are you going to manually review and enter orders, at least to begin with? I sure would.
Yes, at least to begin with, when the customer sells bc's and receives
dollars. I wouldn't give a script the access to my dollar reserves so
lightly. The other way around (customer's dollars -> bitcoins) it
doesn't feel that insecure, and it's certainly nicer for the customer
to receive his bitcoins immediately.
mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote: > I have registered the domain name bitcoinexchange.com and will > start coding the service sometime soon as a nice leisure activity. > I'm envisioning a simple Google-like interface with no registration > and only two texts fields on the front page, where you insert the > amount of money you wish to trade, and either your PayPal address > to buy dollars or bitcoin address to buy bitcoins. On the next page > you'll get a new bitcoin address for sending the coins or a check > code for the PayPal transaction text. > > PayPal is good for the beginning - it's simple and has no startup > costs, but later on I might accept credit cards also. > > Do you still need the maintenance account? It's ok if you do, but > change the password to something else. >
mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote:I'd also need at least the command line tools to check if coins have been received and to send coins. It would require some way to communicate with the Bitcoin process running in the background. I don't know how that should be done, maybe with something RPC related. It would also be great if the background process was non-graphical - the VPS on the current service level doesn't have enough memory to run the X Windowing environment, unless I come up with some ways to free memory.
I had been wondering why everyone keeps harping on no-UI, when already
you can run it with only a small icon on the tray, which is common for
server services on Windows. So I guess this is why. I had chalked it
up to unix snobbery if they couldn't abide a tiny little icon on a
desktop they never see.
Not opening any windows is easy, but it may fail because the gtk
libraries aren't there. wxWidgets has __WXBASE__ for "Only wxBase, no
GUI features". You could try building for that instead of __WXGTK__ and
see what happens. It would be preferable if there's any way to do it as
a command line switch on the same executable, rather than yet another
build variation to release.
How much memory do you have to work with? Bitcoin necessarily takes a
fair bit of memory; about 75MB on Windows. Is that a problem?
Command line control is one of the next things on the list. I want to
design the API carefully.
Receiving payments is the part that has a lot of design choices to be
made. The caller needs to identify the transactions of interest, that's
where the one-bitcoin-address-per-transaction model helps. Searching
the comments text for an order number is another possibility. There's
polled, asking what has been received to the given bitcoin address, and
event driven. I guess in event driven, bitcoin would be told to run a
command line when a certain amount is received to a certain bitcoin address.
How much memory do you have to work with?
The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also
500MB swap space.
Bitcoin necessarily takes a fair bit of memory; about 75MB on Windows. Is that a problem?
Sure about that? Windows task manager shows about 13MB memory usage here.
You're right, I was looking at a test run with 250,000 blocks... duh.
A normal one shows 17MB memory usage and 10MB VM size.
mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote:> How much memory do you have to work with? The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also 500MB swap space. > Bitcoin necessarily takes a > fair bit of memory; about 75MB on Windows. Is that a problem? Sure about that? Windows task manager shows about 13MB memory usage here.