I guess this Ignecio is the one to talk to?
Point-of-Sale Giant Ingenico Rolls Out Worldwide Bitcoin Payments
BitPay has partnered with payments giant Ingenico to allow brick and mortar stores to accept bitcoin via its point-of-sale (POS) terminals.
The payment solution, unveiled today as part of Blockchain Week, was developed by BitPay and installed on an Ingenico Terminal ICT250.
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According to the company, it will be compatible with the majority of Ingenico terminals as they run its operating system, Tellium.
http://www.coindesk.com/point-of-sale-giant-ingenico-rolls-out-worldwide-bitcoin-payments/I saw that earlier and its about as good as you'll ever get with Bitcoin and other cryptos derived from its architecture, you
always need a 3rd party or middle man of some kind.
The solution that Bitpay are offering won't be much different that those Paypal debit cards you can get and it certainly wont be a
decentralized native BTC payment solution similar to what we present here. You load BTC to your Bitpay account, Bitpay will fire off some fiat to the merchant from their account, and debit the equivalent amount of BTC required to honor the sale from your account then throw up a sell to settle it.
It'll likely operate over the Visa/Mastercard network, but Bitpay could have set up their own end point where the terminal connects to them directly, doubtful but possible (if anyone knows I'd love to know!).
Just like Paypal or your bank though, they will be the authority on whether the payment goes through or not. Someone at Bitpay doesn't like what you are spending your BTC on, payment denied/card blocked, government/NSA duly informed!
All they have likely done with the terminals (save for implementing their own network) is provide a user interface so that it displays "Paying with BTC" when you insert that card and the associated options to do so. The terminal then just instructs whoever the payment network operator is (Visa/MC) that Bitpay is the authorization for that payment and routes the information accordingly. The merchant probably doesn't even know you've paid with BTC.
Will it work and allow you to pay with BTC? Sure it will, but there are solutions already available that do the same thing except they don't have the marginally improved PoS integration and experience.
Already had the dev kits and terminal devices for some time now, Ive worked in the payments sector of FinTech in the past pre-eMunie (NFC solution development) so still got access to a lot of stuff.
Ingenico and Verisign are the 2 major players globally so we're planning to roll out on those initially, but ultimately I'd like to have the eMunie payment protocol installed by the OEM on the devices. Thankfully I'm still in contact with some very nice folks at Atos from those NFC days, so I'm hoping they can help to oil the gears a little