This is a Bitcoin point of sale application. It was mainly written to demonstrate the use of the green address feature, but can also be used independently of that. It is written in Python and works in combination with a standard Bitcoin client. It is targeted at standard PC hardware, e.g. laptop (used by merchant) + external monitor (facing the customer). See a video of the system in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o84SfChQ-S8 .
- System idle
- Entering a new amount
- Receiving a transaction from Instawallet's green address
- install dependencies: python-qrencode, python-qt4
- add "server=1" (but not daemon=1) to bitcoin.conf and configure rpcuser & rpcpassword
- create the file $HOME/.greenaddress-pos-tool with this contents:
{
"exchange_rate_ticker": {
"source": "MtGox.com",
"currency": "USD",
"url": "https://mtgox.com/api/0/data/ticker.php",
"fields": ["ticker", "last"],
"interval": 5
},
"green_addresses": {
"1CDysWzQ5Z4hMLhsj4AKAEFwrgXRC8DqRN": "Verified by Instawallet."
},
"rpc_url": "http://rpcuser:rpcpassword@127.0.0.1:8332",
"single-screen-mode": true
}
- run: python pos-tool.py
You should see two windows popping up: The merchant back end and the customer display. If you enter a BTC amount and click "Update display", a new Bitcoin address and associated QR code will be generated and displayed to the customer. The tool then listens for transactions to the Bitcoin address and as soon as it receives something, it changes the display to read "Payment received". If the payment was done via Instawallets green address, it will add the phrase "Verified by Instawallet". The merchant is expected to use their Bitcoin client to see if the correct amount was sent.
You can read more about the green address technique in this thread: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32818.0 . Currently (as of August 2011) only https://www.instawallet.org implements this convention. If you want to initiate green address transactions from your mobile phone, you will need a mobile client for Instawallet. I'm currently only aware of the Android client BitPay ( https://github.com/warpi/BitPay ), with a few other clients still in development. The current version of BitPay available in the Android market does not yet include support for the green address feature. A (self-signed) version that does, can be found here: https://github.com/javgh/greenaddress-pos-tools/BitPay.apk/qr_code .
I'm developing on Linux, so this is only tested on Linux. But I would hope this to be fairly portable. Patches to make it work (better) on Windows and/or Mac OS are welcome.
If you look at the code, you will see that it contains a simple Bitcoin node implementation. This is used to listen for transactions and get notified as soon as one arrives. This could be done much easier with a patch to bitcoind (for example a version of Gavin's monitor patch: bitcoin/bitcoin#198 ), but an important goal of this project is to have as few dependencies as possible and especially be able to run with a vanilla Bitcoin daemon. This is why I went the route of using ArtForz' "half-a-node" implementation to listen for transactions manually. (Hopefully this can be dropped at some point in the future, when the official client allows some form of push-notification directly.)
If you appreciate this initial release, donations are gladly accepted at 1CQoprPjRmsDQDzgmUK1njmXSv3SMpAjm7 .