BitPay Integrates Bitcoin with Fulfillment by Amazon (opens in new tab)

I really wish it would crash already. I don't feel comfortable buying any right now for day-to-day purchases because the crash has to be coming.

This scares me in ways I don't understand. I feel like I just looked at the price not too long ago and it was $26.

Note to anyone who's designing cryptographic currency 2.0: stabilize the price next time. It doesn't have to be tied to USD but it should be tied to something. Control over the supply automatically gives you control over the price, you can peg to whatever you want.

Global GDP futures perhaps? It would be interesting to have a currency worth a particular percent of global output.

It shouldn't really matter to Amazon. Their fulfillment service is just an API for saying "take this item from your warehouse and ship it to this address". Amazon doesn't know that you're shipping things in response to a BitCoin payment, versus goodies for KickStarter backers, versus holiday gifts for customers. All BitPay is doing is integrating their API with Amazon's API for you so that receiving a payment can kick off a shipment. It doesn't create any new potential liability for Amazon; they're not touching bitcoins and their payment for the fulfillment service is separate from what they're fulfilling.

To be honest, bitcoind, the original Bitcoin client has a very accessible json-rpc API [0]. This is the same daemon that runs behind the QT front-end of the "official" Bitcoin client. RPC is not my favorite (gotten spoiled by RESTful), but bitcoind's implementation is easy-to-use, and most languages have nice, easy-to-use json-rpc libraries [1]. You run bitcoind as a headless client on your server. It's pretty robust, and multithreaded. The benefit to that setup is that you are in control of everything, no need to depend on (or pay) a third-party. And there's no need to store Bitcoins on the server beyond what you need for your transactions, since you can set up a cron job to periodically forward x percentage of the balance to an off-site wallet with ease.

However, if you want something with a RESTful interface that you don't have to maintain yourself, ycombinator-funded Coinbase appears to have a nice API. But unlike bitcoind (which I've used for several small and one largish project), I've never used coinbase or any of the other third-party APIs.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoind [1] http://json-rpc.org/wiki/implementations [2] https://coinbase.com/

EDIT: Clarity, grammar.

I've had good luck with Bitfloor. They let you do a cash deposit at Bank of America, and it goes instantly to your account. No ID or addresses or anything.

Yes, they've been hacked before and lost bitcoins. I figure 1. being hacked once probably makes them a lot more cautious now, and 2. what was stolen was bitcoins that were sitting in user accounts there. You're at very low risk if you don't leave bitcoins sitting in your account - transfer them to a private wallet or convert them to USD immediately.

Coinbase's "daily limit" is, as far as I can tell, a rolling "daily limit". Keep retrying and you can buy bitcoins.

Source: I bought BTC on coinbase right before I replied to your comment.

localbitcoins.com will work in a lot of places. ziggap.com is another one similar to coinbase. ziggap uses western union/ money gram and so has higher fees, but less wait time. also have seen btc sold on ebay, but with a pretty big markup.

also, you can mine them yourself ;-)

I help run a guide site for bitcoin newbies trying to buy:

http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/

I recommend the following services right now: http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/bitme/ http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/localbitcoins/ http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/ziggap/

Maybe bitinstant.com