- I'm a self employed electrician in Europe.
I'd like to accept BTC as payments,
but I think that initially it will just be a few
transactions a year.
What about BTC's pay server versus just printing
a Bitcoin address on the invoice?
How does BTC pay server work?
BTC based server gives you a ton of flexibility that allows
you to have multiple companies, multiple wallets,
to create and track thousands and thousands of invoices
and payments,
but it takes quite a bit of work to install and deploy
at the very least.
If you installed it and deployed it as a Docker container,
you need to be familiar with how the setup services on
something like the Microsoft Azure cloud service.
You need to configure it,
way too complicated.
And there's no reason to do that
for a few transactions a year.
Really simple, if you have a hardware wallet,
what you do is you generate to receive address on your
hardware wallet,
and then you copy and paste that receive address
and if you want the QR code into an invoice and you can make
that using something as simple as Google docs,
make a nice little template and paste your QR codes and
address in there
and that's it
it's useful when you create
an invoice like that,
to give instructions on how someone should calculate
the exchange rate,
because you're probably not billing in Bitcoin.
That's going to be very difficult for customers,
even if those customers are Bitcoin aficionados, right?
Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are great as a
medium of exchange and a store of value,
but not particularly good as units of accounts
because of volatility.
So you'll probably be billing in euros and you're going to
need to do your accounting and tax payments in euros anyway,
so that makes it easier.
So let's say you bill a hundred Euro for one of your
services and your customer needs to pay you in Bitcoin.
So you have a Bitcoin address on your invoice.
They will need to find a way preferably an agreed way that
you're comfortable with on deciding what the exchange rate
is at the time of payment.
So even if you just put a little blurb at the bottom of the
invoice that says terms and conditions,
and you say exchange rate calculated at time of payment
based on BitcoinAverage.com,
CoinCap.io,
CoinMarketCap.com or whatever other mechanism
or price index you want to use
and that's what you would put in your invoice so that your
customer knows, okay, at the moment of payment,
I go on one of these price indices.
I calculate the exchange rate for a hundred Euro and I pay
that amount in Bitcoin to the Bitcoin address that is below.
Now remember different Bitcoin address, different QR code,
obviously for every invoice,
you want every payment to be in its own Bitcoin address.
For two reasons,
reason number one:
It gives you a really easy way to track payments.
So when you create the receive address
in your hardware wallet,
you can tag it.
You can label it and say payment from John,
for installation of solar panels and that way,
when you see a credit against that, and you're like,
Oh, okay, that was invoice 13 payment from John.
And so you can track who has paid you and who hasn't another
reason why you would want to have a separate address per
invoice, of course, is for privacy.
That way your customer
who receives this invoice can't see all
of the payments you've received before
and you're not reusing addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain
or any blockchain, which is a serious privacy risk for you.
So that's another consideration, but you know, really,
really simple.
You don't need the full blown BTC pay server or such system
in order to just do an invoice a few times a year.
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