[wplug-board] Accepting Bitcoin payments

[Justin Smith]

Hey, everyone! I know how busy you are, so I thought I’d give you a quick summary of how 
WPLUG could accept Bitcoin payments for dues and donations.

The service I have in mind is called Coinbase[1]. It aims for the level of simplicity that 
people have come to expect from services like PayPal. I heard about it through Jupiter 
Broadcasting’s Plan B show, where it has been featured several times.

(JB uses Coinbase to process Bitcoin donations and payments, so they practice what they 
preach. I trust Plan B’s advice, ergo, I trusted Coinbase enough to sign up for an account 
myself.)

Setting up a Coinbase account takes as little as 10 minutes. The registration form requires 
only a username and password. After that, you need to add a bank account. If Coinbase’s 
“instant lookup” tool can verify your banking details, the bank account will be approved 
right there on the spot. If not, Coinbase will make two small deposits to the bank account, 
and you’ll have to report back how much they were. (The deposits take 2-3 business days 
to clear.)

That’s it. No mountain of paperwork. As soon as you have a bank account set up, you can 
start buying/selling BTC or accepting BTC payments.

Coinbase has a form you can use to generate payment, donation, or subscription buttons. 
You just enter the name of the product, give it a description, and set how much it costs in 
US Dollars. The form spits out code you can copy and paste wherever you want to put a 
payment button.

People who click the payment button will be prompted to pay BTC equivalent to the 
product's USD price at that moment. If 1 BTC = $20, the button would ask users to pay 1 
BTC. If the price of BTC crashes later in the day so that 1 BTC = $10, the button would 
dynamically adjust the price and ask users to pay 2 BTC. In effect, you will always receive 
the USD price you originally set.

Payments you receive can be converted to USD and deposited to your bank account every 
business day. The conversion fee is 1% plus 15 cents, which is considerably lower than 
processing fees for credit card-based service like Stripe. Since Coinbase is inexpensive and 
Bitcoin is open source, I propose that WPLUG makes Bitcoin its preferred online payment 
method. 

TL;DR version: Coinbase allows you to accept Bitcoin payments without having to worry 
about Bitcoin’s price fluctuations, and you can get started in as little as 10 minutes.

--
*Justin S. Smith*
Vice chair/secretary, WPLUG Board of Directors
http://www.wplug.org[2] 

"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done."
-Linus Torvalds

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[1] http://www.coinbase.com
[2] http://www.wplug.org
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