Accept bitcoin in website

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency which has been growing rapidly in popularity and use. You can send bitcoins to people and businesses around the world quickly, easily, and with much less fees than international wire transfers, PayPal, or Visa, e.t.c.

This is a step-by-step guide, how to accept bitcoin in your website without using the full node or third-party service like blockchain.info or blocktrail.com or any other bitcoin-wallet site.

Nowadays the full bitcoin node is too huge to storage on the low-cost VPS, for example current full node occupies 186G (13 March 2018).

We are going to create a simple store website with the users and they accounts, every account will have an address to receive payments in bitcoin in order to deposit balance.

We'll use the electrum wallet is a S.P.V client.

S.P.V. or Simplified Payment Verification - A method for verifying if particular transactions are included in a block without downloading the entire block.

In this guide we have used bitcoin testnet but you can try to use it with mainnet.

testnet - is the test network that runs in parallel with mainnet, except that the coins costs nothing.

mainnet - is the real Bitcoin network. You can of course experiment with this network, but it costs real money—not only to buy bitcoins in the first place—but also transaction fees, even when sending bitcoins to yourself.

Requirements

I'm going to use linux OS with Docker and Postgresql database.

_{You may work without Docker, just run all commands from the launch_electrum script.}

I assume you're able to use linux command line and you have some knowledge about Docker, Ruby on Rails and shell scripting.

I have created the Rails application and setup it, you can clone it from here. That's a simple Rails application. The Robot Store.

Checklist

Build wallet image

I'll use the Docker image with Ubuntu OS, here is Dockerfile:

FROM ubuntu:16.04
LABEL version="1.0"
LABEL maintainer="[email protected]"

# Set electrum wallet version here
ENV ELECTRUM_VERSION 3.1.1
# RPC settings passed by env variables
ENV RPCPORT 8443
ENV RPCHOST 0.0.0.0
ENV RPCUSER admin1
ENV RPCPASSWORD admin1

ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

# Install electrum depends.
RUN apt-get update && \
 apt-get install --yes wget \
 software-properties-common \
 python-qt4 python3-setuptools python3-pyqt5 python3-pip

# Copy setup file
COPY launch_electrum .

ENTRYPOINT bash

From the folder with Dockerfile build image:

sudo docker build -t electrum .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  81.46MB
Step 1/12 : FROM ubuntu:16.04
 ---> 2a4cca5ac898
Step 2/12 : ENV ELECTRUM_VERSION 3.1.1
 ---> Using cache
 ---> ed7976d13167
Step 3/12 : ENV RPCPORT 8443
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 645799a9869a
Step 4/12 : ENV RPCHOST 0.0.0.0
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 79287a26b3d6
Step 5/12 : ENV RPCUSER admin1
 ---> Using cache
 ---> b2aa80fae400
Step 6/12 : ENV RPCPASSWORD admin1
 ---> Using cache
 ---> bd55826fd89b
Step 7/12 : LABEL version="1.0"
 ---> Using cache
... output omited ...

Setup electrum wallet

Run electrum container, you must see shell prompt, run launch_electrum to setup wallet(if you're running in the mainnet you must enter wallet password and save the seed phrase, otherwise hit return if you do not wish to encrypt your wallet):

sudo docker run -it --rm -p 8443:8443 electrum
root@2862317a0ff2:/# ./launch_electrum 
Download electrum-3.1.1 ...
Setup configuration ...
Setup RPC PORT => 8443 ...
true
Setup RPC HOST => 0.0.0.0 ...
true
Setup RPC USER => admin1 ...
true
Setup RPC PASSWORD => admin1 ...
true
Setup wallet password >>>
Password (hit return if you do not wish to encrypt your wallet):
Your wallet generation seed is:
"beach elegant half scheme inject such diet profit boost silly bike bicycle"
Please keep it in a safe place; if you lose it, you will not be able to restore your wallet.
Wallet saved in '/root/.electrum/testnet/wallets/default_wallet'
Load wallet >>>
starting daemon (PID 49)
true
Start daemon >>>
Press Ctrl+C to stop >>>

If you dont use Docker you can run this script step by step. Read the comments carefully in order to understand the purpose of the script commands.

Test RPC server

At this point we have setup and run electrum wallet in the daemon mode, to check if the RPC server is running successfully, ping it with the next curl command:

 curl --data-binary '{"id":"curltext","method":"getbalance","params":[]}' http://admin1:[email protected]:8443

Here’s what you should be seeing after running curl command:

{
  "result": {
    "confirmed": "0"
  },
  "id": "curltext",
  "error": null
}

If your output is other, you're doing something wrong, rollback and check all steps again.

Database and application desing

Database tables:

Payments - is a bitcoin transaction with included block and value in satoshi.
Purshase - is a join table between users and the merch items.
Robot - is a purchase item.

There are three kind of abstraction which represent user balance:

Confirmed - is the sum of all confirmed incoming transactions(payment) minus sum of all purchases.
Unconfirmed - is the sum of all unconfirmed transactions(payment).
Payments - the sum of all purchases.

The user balance:

# user.rb
has_many :payments

has_many :purchases
has_many :robots, through: :purchases

def balance
  # / 100_000_000.0 - because values in the satoshi 0.00000001 BTC is 1 satoshi
  # but we store coins as integer not as decimal
  (confirmed - purchases.sum(:value)) / 100_000_000.0
end

def confirmed
  payments.where('included_in_block > 0').sum(:value)
end

RPC provider

In order to communicate with wallet there is a module PaymentProcessor it is a simple http service which talk with electrum RPC server.

require 'httparty'

class PaymentProcessor
  include HTTParty
  base_uri "http://#{RobotStore::Application.secrets.btc_host}:#{RobotStore::Application.secrets.btc_port}"

  def initialize
    @request_id = 0
    @options = {
      headers: { "Content-Type" => "application/json" },
      basic_auth: {
        username: RobotStore::Application.secrets.btc_user,
        password: RobotStore::Application.secrets.btc_password
      }
    }
  end

  # Create a new receiving address,
  # beyond the gap limit of the wallet
  def get_new_address
    request do
      build_params("createnewaddress")
    end
  end

  # Returns the UTXO list of any address
  # https://bitcoin.org/en/glossary/unspent-transaction-output
  def get_address_unspent(address)
    request do
      build_params("getaddressunspent", address)
    end
  end

  def body
    @body["result"]
  end

  def success?
    @success
  end

  private

  def request
    @request_id = @request_id.next
    response = self.class.post(
      "/", 
      @options.merge!(body: yield.to_json)
    )
    @body, @success = response.parsed_response, response.success?
  end
  

  def build_params(method, params = nil)
    {
      id: @request_id,
      method: method,
      params: [params].compact 
    }
  end
end

Reg a user and request address

At this step we have:

RPC wallet are running in the daemon mode.
Rails application with the RPC module.
Users, Purchase, Robot, Payment models.

Let's buy some robot now!

Payment processing

_{You can clone an example here}

The setup steps for Rails application:

cd robot_store
bundle install - install Rails depends.
bundle exec rake db:create - create database.
bundle exec rake db:migrate - run database migrations.
bundle exec rake db:seed - seed database with some robots.
bundle exec rails server - run rails server.

Open the robot store and sign up a user.

Here’s what you should be seeing after successfull registration:

At this point we cant buy any robots, need to deposit some coins. After successfull address request you'll see:

Now we have the address and we can send some coins to that address. I'll use this faucet.

After successfull request trough faucet, we should wait at least one confirmation. In order to update our payments we'll run rake task bundle exec rake pull_payments. Here is what you'll see if you have any incoming transaction.

There is an unconfirmed balance B1.30000000. Run rake task bundle exec rake pull_payments periodically.

After wait a little our balance must change from unconfirmed to confirmed and you'll able to buy some robots.

Closing

We have created a webstore with robot merch items and payments in bitcoins.

Donation

Are you like this tutorial? Buy me a beer and I'll write more tutorials like this one:

BTC - 19SYMA2hqRZHRSL4di35Uf7jV87KBKc9bf
ETH - 0xD7cc10f0d70Fd8f9fB83D4eF9250Fc9201981e3a

Thank you!

Disclaimer

❗ you are using this guide at your own risk..

_{P.S. forgive me my bad English, it’s not my native language.} _{Happy hacking!}

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