Topic: Bitcoin centric shopping cart (Read 455 times)

I hope this is on the right board.

I'm one of those trying to purchase an Avalon ASIC.  The experience has led me to think of how I might conduct a similar sale, and I thought I would throw out some thoughts for the community to consider.

I like auctions, and my system would is influenced by my experience attending auctions.  My shopping cart would be a front end to a mySQL + PHP system.  I am indifferent as to whether I run this system, or I contract it out to someone else.  (I could also provide the service of this style shopping cart to lots of businesses.)  I would collect his information:

1.  Customer id information.
Name
Shipping Address
email contact
phone number
address used to submit this payment.  The customer has full control over this address, such as one time use.

2.  The customer id stuff would be signed in a bitcoin client and the signed document would be dropped into the shopping cart.

3.  Invoice information

An invoice would be presented that lists
Item sold
price quote in BTC
the address that the customer sends BTC to. 

4.  Public bids
For an auction, I would use the same address for all the bidders.  So...one address would be for all the bids on "Billy Bob's John Deere Combine, 2005" and another for "ProfMac Instruments' ExaHashery"

All the transactions (bids) would be time-stamped and public by the ordinary actions of bitcoins.  All the pay-from addresses could be one time use and not publicly traceable.  The paranoid could use a mixer to load that address.  This is all under customer control.


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Using Avalon as an example, only because it is currently of interest to the community, there are a few different scenarios that might evolve.

1.  With a limit of 600 purchases and fixed (BTC) price, the 1st 600 fully paid transactions would get the order.  The auditing is clean and public.  Privacy is under the control of the customer.
2.  With a more traditional auction scenario, all of the payments that match (customer address, auction address, submitted before deadline) would be totaled.  The 600 high bids would be accepted, the remaining bids would be returned.
3.  Again, in the case of Avalon, several address could be disclosed.  For example, the March 600 public address, the March Lancelot return address, the April 600 public address, the May 600 public address.
4.  Cleanup addresses could also be disclosed.  For example, anyone who bid on the March auction and had their money returned could pay on the April cleanup address.  Payments from a previously unknown address to the cleanup address would simply be returned.

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The unique mixture of anonymity, public time-stamps and amounts, and a large pool of accounting addresses allows a shopping card that is very unique to the Bitcoin world.

Just my too much coffee thoughts for this morning.