Bitcoin Payments with a Click

With recent Bitcoin coverage in the news and media, I’ve picked up playing around with it again. One thing that came to mind was something that would make it easier to make payments to addresses found on the web. My first thought was doing the same thing as a MailTo link on the web, click the link and the client opens up with the details in place. Granted copying and pasting the address isn’t that big of a deal, but this makes it easier to send or donate to a website.

Now I have to be honest I wasn’t sure what the correct name for the MailTo link was called. One quick Google search led me to the MailTo URI Scheme Wikipedia page. Another Google search for “Bitcoin URI Scheme” led me to this page with a technical write up of a URI Scheme for sending Bitcoin payments. Lo and behold, the samples on that page work just like I’d expect by opening the local client on my computer with the address filled in. The only problem I can see is that most sites aren’t using this already. I would imagine that this would be a no brainer, where anything that makes it easier to send you money is always a good idea. So here’s my plea to other sites to add the code needed for the bitcoin link.

Just in case anyone needs a refresher, it’s done with the <a> tag and in it’s simplest form would look like this.

<a href="bitcoin:PutPaymentAddressHere">Link text goes here</a>

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2 thoughts on “Bitcoin Payments with a Click”

  1. We do the same for SatoshiBet. One open issue still is that if the Qt client is already running, it can give an error. But yeah, that hopefully will be fixed in an upcoming release.

  2. I’m using the Qt client and I haven’t had any issues with it so far. It might be a sporadic error, I’m running Qt client v0.8.1-beta.

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