Solid lead, thanks... anyone been working with any crypto currencies ?
Hello, as it so happens, I am the current Chair of the Education Committee of the Bitcoin Foundation.
Here are my recommendations for cryptocurrency (or cryptocurrency-related) solutions.
If you are running a Wordpress site and do business through your Wordpress site: You may want to try the
Bitcoin Payments for WooCommerce (a plugin). This also requires that you use the WooCommerce plugin, which itself is very handy for accepting payments in forms other than bitcoin, such as regular old U.S. dollars. The Bitcoin Payments for WooCommerce plugin is designed to send funds you receive straight to your bitcoin wallet, nobody else controls or touches them; so for that you'll need to download and install an
Electrum wallet (Linux, Windows, OSX, or Android).
PayPal recently changed its terms of service and as a result, has been able to block things more at its discretion, particularly for cases involving donations (although I believe PayPal is starting to block more firearms-related transactions regardless of whether or not they are donations to a pro-firearms organization). That is why not so very long ago I recommended to FPC (Firearms Policy Coalition) that they stop using PayPal and in fact they did, they switched over to a new system not relying on PayPal.
If you are looking to set up a payment processor system to accept cryptocurrency (bitcoin) payments, I strongly recommend Mycelium Gear. You can run it
as a hosted service (easiest) or alternatively if you or people you know are competent, you can install it and roll your own (
instructions here). Gear will NEVER hold your money, it is simply a system of getting the cryptocurrency being sent to you being routed directly to YOUR WALLET, so there is nobody like PayPal to hold onto or freeze your funds!
This means you also have to set up your own wallet. To set up your own wallet, I recommend either downloading
Mycelium (for Android or iPhone), or
Electrum (Linux, Windows, OSX, or Android). You periodically update the wallets every once in a while, but they are easy to use.
These wallets do require you to download wallet software, which you can safeguard by encrypting the wallet with your own password on your own device. They are designed so that you never have to interact with or share your information with any company, government, or intermediary in order to complete a transaction.
DO NOT USE WEB WALLETS! Coinbase has actively censored gun owners for some time (it also reports all your transactions to banks and the government - including to the IRS, even though there is no need for any service provider to report on their own users). So don't use them! In like manner
DO NOT use BitPay, BitReserve, Bitstamp, BTC.sx, Coinsetter, DATA, Delta, Epiphyte, Erik Voorhees, Hub Culture Group/Ven Currency, LaunchKey, Personal, Personal Black Box, Ripple Labs, SnapSwap, Swarm, Trefoil Labs, Vaurum, Xapo, ZipZap or ANY bitcoin service which would require you to "sign up" with a username and password. In general, those services which have your information are often required to give it to the government at some point - but beyond that, they also are holding your digital keys and could freeze your funds at any time. Thus, don't use them!
Stay away from web wallets and any bitcoin services which would ask you to "sign up." The only exception I can think of is Mycelium Gear, because Mycelium literally is expressly designed NOT to hold any of your funds, ever.