automate bitcoins payins

[sim6]

Please add support for automate bitcoins payins.

Did you help close this issue? Go claim the $15 bounty on Bountysource.

[knocte]

It has a bounty: http://freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/16/pre-pay-gittip-with-bitcoin

[sim6]

@knocte Maybe the bounty is for automate payins and payouts #1964

[knocte]

Bounty's title says "pre-pay". I don't think you can pre-pay a payout ;)

[sim6]

@knocte I am sorry, OK, you are right.

[pjf]

+1

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @campadrenalin via [email protected].

[xnyhps]

I don't have any prior experience with Conbase's API, but just from looking at it, I think this would be relatively straightforward to do. Coinbase has a "payment button" API to create buttons, which open an iframe that requests payment. The payment can make the amount editable (which I think makes sense for a payin).

The suggested amounts are editable (with configurable suggestions), and the currency can be specified (so there can be a separate button for paying in EUR, GBP, etc.). Downside of everything but USD is that Coinbase doesn't show you how much that will be in USD, so unless you look up the exchange rate yourself, you won't know by how much your Gittip balance will increase until after you pay. Coinbase can be configured to deposit the received payments in USD automatically, for 1% + $0.15 fee. (Deposits happen only once a day, so the $0.15 fee is only charged once for all payins on one day.)

After the payment, Coinbase will post the payment information to a callback that you specify. It receives JSON encoded data that describes the order, including the amount of USD, so it can then be used to update the user's Gittip balance.

Open issues:

• I don't understand exactly how Coinbase handles mispaid orders. The callback page states:

  mispaid_native Total amount received in your local currency in cents (1 unit = 100 cents). This will be equal to the price you set when creating the button.

  This sentence seems to contradict itself: if the order was mispaid, the amount received won't be equal to the price set. May not be really important, as users can set their price anyway.

• I'm not sure how the fees should be handled. Subtracting 1% + $0.15 from the amount paid sounds fair, but what would happen if a user tries to deposit $0.14?

[clone1018]

#2053

[xnyhps]

Ah, I hadn't seen that PR (it wasn't linked from this ticket before). I do think being able to do a one-off payin in BTC is a different use case from repeated payments (which require a Coinbase account), but I guess repeated payments take priority for Gittip.

[rohitpaulk]

No more bitcoin, closing this.

[sim6]

More info at gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#201 (comment)