I’d love to be able to sit behind a table at a con and say “That’ll be $25, will that be cash, credit, or bitcoin?”. But it starts to get complicated for that last one.
Ideally I’d be able to run an app on my phone and have it build a QR code for people to scan. But the problem with that is that Apple, in its infinite wisdom, isn’t allowing any apps to transfer bitcoin. I’m jailbroken so I can install the blockchain.info wallet app via Cydia but it only lets me specify how much I want to ask for in BTC.
I could maybe generate ‘pay $amount to this wallet’ QR codes with the bitcoin app on my Mac, but I’d really love to be able to do it with nothing but tablet and phone at the table.
I could also generate several ‘pay $amount to this wallet’ QR codes while at the computer and keep them somewhere – probably in a note on Evernote. I’d have to regenerate those every con to reflect that weekend’s price of bitcoin. (I could also print them out but fuck that, this is BITCOIN we’re talking about here.)
Hmm, I could also install this on my site and hardwire it to send to my wallet. Or to a secondary wallet that I keep on a website like coinbase or blockchain or mtgox or whatever so I can check that the transaction went through. Type in the price, let the purchaser scan it with their bitcoin wallet app, and go.
Also mtgox has a “generate invoice” section on its mobile site, but it seems to glitch out for me – it just shows a spinner forever. Oh, I see, it does that if I don’t enter anything into the ‘description’ field. Okay so there’s that for a quick and dirty method at least; I can make some text expansions to quickly type “Egypt Urnash convention merchandise” in there and type a USD in manually. It feels a little inelegant and it has some annoying bits of non-native English but it also involves absolutely no extra work on my part.
Aha, even better: the mobile version of Coinbase’s “request money” tab will generate a QR and doesn’t care about extra text. Plus it won’t have a tab labeled “infos” sitting there tripping my inner grammarian all the time. Hooray!
I think I’ll also want to put up a QR code with my generic “send this wallet some bitcoins” address along with “I take bitcoins!”.