Coinkite announces a new kind of "Bitcoin Payment Button" that lets anyone accept bitcoin as payment for products or services. The first of its kind Pay Button is a plain HTML, embeddable payment processing option that shows prices in Bitcoin and an optional local currency.
The ‘Craig’s List’ of Payment Processors
While the internet is rife with bitcoin payment processing services such as BitPay and GoCoin, Coinkite – known for their Nyms personalized wallets – is the first website to allow TOR users to make bitcoin payments while Javascript and cookies are disabled without collecting any personal information from the buyer. Buyers can either pay directly or via their Coinkite account.
Regarding security, Coinkite stated on their website that “Most payment systems are heavy-handed when it comes to identity and Coinkite has always allowed its users complete anonymity and the all responsibility that goes with that freedom.”
The security-oriented company sells everything from Multi-sig vaults to Bitcoin Exchange Terminals, but has also made KYC/AML possible for those interested in the new Pay Button integration, by adding common payment processors features such as an option to collect refund address, memo, shipping information, and email addresses.
The company has also considered privacy in donation. By allowing charities to receive payments directly to their Nym avatars, donors do not have to publicly disclose how much they have paid and charities do not have to keep one public wallet for all to see.
Coinkite CTO and Founder Peter Gray said:
“Our goal was to create something empowering, like Craigslist. They get privacy, and always have. Now anyone can collect a few bitcoins online in exchange for goods or services using Coinkite."
Feature-Laden
Using cryptographically-secured JWT Tokens, developers using the Coinkite payment gateway do not have to worry about fraudsters overriding prices and tampering with their webstores.
Unlike other payment processors such as Bitpay, Coinkite’s Shapeshift.io’s integration allows customers to pay with altcoins such as Litecoin and Dogecoin.
Developers are also able to set dynamic prices and add web hook events whenever payments are made using the BitKit API.
Since many bitcoin wallets are limited in their effective withdraw speeds, Coinkite allowed “slow wallets” 15 minutes to pay before the invoice expires and needs to be refreshed. Using the above API, Coinkite has also allowed vendors to extend the timeout period to a value of their choice.
In order to protect retailers from volatile cryptocurrency exchange rates, Coinkite allowed the new Pay Now service to utilize their Bitcoin automated forwarding. In other words, users can send their payments instantly to exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitstamp and Kraken.
Users also have the option of splitting the payments they receive between internal Coinkite wallets and external Bitcoin/Litecoin services along with the exchanges.
In an effort to counteract zero confirmation double-spends on Litecoin and Blackcoin, the service does not follow the standard no-confirmation invoices, opting to wait for a default of one confirmation instead. When selling digital products, Coinkite’s webhook server “will be called three times in the typical case: zero confirmation (public transaction seen first time), one confirmation and four confirmations.”