Topic: [2017-09-19] Google ‘Accepts’ Bitcoin With Payments API Update (Read 6347 times)

A good move at least this is good news, millions of people will buy Bitcoin and prices will increase as demand increases.
yes ..we should wait for the next news.

Welcoming news indeed. But we have to wait what's the real impact on the ecosystem. To early to speculate but we all know what's Google's capability, they reaches billions of people everyday. Of course they won't simply jump on the bandwagon without getting a piece of the action, they will charge a small portion and the rest goes to the merchant. This is just the beginning, once merchant find bitcoin to be acceptable, its just a matter of time before we can call that bitcoin has truly been 'mass adopted'. For now, let's see how it pans out.

Great news, Google is a giant company I'm sure this will have a good impact for Bitcoin.
Who does not know Google right now, and then everyone will know Bitcoin as well. BTC

This is a great news.  Another milestone for Bitcoin acceptance.  With lots of people using google, there is sure lots of new audience for bitcoin market.  I just hope that most users will jump in using Bitcoin as payment in google.


We can ignore the charging part but Google accepting Bitcoin alone is a news to sell .  I am same as you, very glad that Google joins the Bitcoin economy.

interesting, not sure many people use their APIs though. Google pay does not seem to go well, but who knows in the future.

Probably they are charging for it.
 I'm very pleased to see that the famous companies are beginning to introduce bitcoin. This makes it popular and more people can join the bitcoin community

Payment API is available for almost a year but still no one uses it. Because it's still to complicated. This is the explanation for the usage:
"At this stage, customers will need to download the browser extension and signal what payment methods they use.

In other words, merchants need to build websites that acknowledge the new payment methods, while users need to have wallets that "speak the protocol that we're writing," Jacobs said. "That’s how the ecosystem pieces together the merchant-side and the user-side."

But still it's good to see Google working on accepting BTC. Still hard to image how it will be done since they say Payment Request is not a payment processor. They just forward data to the merchant so if that is the case what is the point ?

It looks like Google has finally jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon. In a new update to its popular Payment Request API, the tech titan added the ability to request bitcoin payments.

This news came with little fanfare, just a small blip in a much larger API update from WebFundamentals contributor Matt Gaundry.

The update mainly consisted of a tutorial on how to use the new features of the update. Towards the bottom of the blog post, Gaundry explained how the API can be used:

    “Invalid Currency: The currency code must be three uppercase characters; passing in anything else will throw an error.

    ‘PaymentRequest’: ‘…’ is not a valid ISO 4217 currency code, should be 3 upper case letters [A-Z]

You can pass in any three characters and it will be treated as a valid currency code.The reason for this is that it allows support for future currencies. For example, bitcoin can be supported with its currency code ‘XBT’.

The currency code is always displayed in Google Chrome at the time of writing, but only known currencies will include the currency character with amounts; otherwise only the currency code is shown. Compare the screenshots below for ‘USD’ and ‘XBT’.”



Bitcoin Payments for Everyone?

What are the implications of this update? In theory, anyone that uses Google’s Payment Request API can accept bitcoin in their online stores.

According to Gaundry, the new functionality that enables bitcoin payments is meant for accepting future payment methods that don’t fall under the official list of methods.

So, in theory, the API could support any currency as long as it has a three-letter code. Talk about competing currencies; merchants can potentially accept any digital currency under the sun.

By using bitcoin as an example for how this new utility works, though, Gaundry — intentionally or not — has suggested that the future might already be here.

https://www.bitsonline.com/google-bitcoin-payments-api/