@Robust Thanks for reply.
And why would it have to be done such a complicated way? In order to send a bitcoin, I only need to know the address of the intended recipient's wallet. Do it the way as Check/Money Order. During the ordering process I will get the QR code of the recipient's wallet. And once the recipient's wallet gets the coin, then they can send the product. It is like paying with a wire transfer. During the checkout process I will get the account number were to send the payment. Once the payment is received, the store owner can send the product. Money Order is a stock feature in osCommerce, for example. Nothing hard to do.
Can you do it this way please?
Sure. The complicated part is here:
And once the recipient's wallet gets the coin, then they can send the product.
You need to confirm that the coin has been received. You also don't want to use third parties and their APIs. Hence, to do this, you need to run a node, with a copy of the blockchain (very large), and develop a specific implementation for each coin (the nodes and protocols vary per coin, so the implementation for certain coins could be completely different, some coins have pretty unstable and unreliable node software). You then need to poll the receiving address for new transactions, maintaining a database of generated wallet addresses to receive each payment, polling each one for a specific period.
It is not as simple to do programmatically as it is manually using a client for the coin. I've only looked into this for a few cryptocurrencies, so some may make it slightly easier to work with, but the general principles are the same if you use the criteria of "no third parties".
There are bandwidth considerations, storage considerations and hosting type considerations to do this automatically.
As far as wire transfers go, those are generally processed (i.e. their status updated by the merchant) manually. There are some APIs (third parties) to automate this. Yodlee is one. They basically emulate online banking requests. Banks do not really have APIs to use for instant payment confirmation, so it's usually just a case of effectively scraping to automatically accept wire transfers.
it is easy to implement support for payment processors, such as PayPal, Stripe, Coinbase, CoinPayments.net, etc. because they do all the dirty work for you. You simply use an API they've made to communicate with them. If you want to process manually, you're effectively creating a payment processor - you need to implement the infrastructure to handle payments. Even if you loosen your requirements and use a Blockchain explorer (a third party, kinda beating the whole 'freedom' thing) to poll for receiving payments, you still need to handle generating payment addresses, moving crypto to a primary wallet, over/under payment, etc. And this effort has to be duplicated for every supported coin. For Bitcoin specifically, you can see some relevant sections
here and
here.
Even if all the effort is put in to code this, and the economical loss ignored, there's a bit of a grey area with the implementation. Your server will need to be pretty secure, holes in its security could result in loss of coin. A bug in this software, a bad incompatibility with another add-on or a poorly secured server could all result in loss of crypto. And that's not really a hassle worth dealing with, or a risk worth taking, for the developer or the forum admin. Not really a comfortable legal position to be in either.
Using an existing API solution for accepting Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, is by far the best solution. When Steam used to accept Bitcoin, even they used Bitpay as their processor.
Fast, simple and secure payment gateway.
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