Paying with bitcoin is as easy as making a payment with a normal debit or credit card. Payments can be carried out from an app on your laptop or smartphone. In order to transfer funds, all you need to do is to insert the address (an identification number) of the receiver and the amount that needs to be transferred.

There are several ways to insert a bitcoin address:

-Manual transcription: it is possible to type it manually or copy paste it in the apposite field, to avoid typos.

-QR code: the QR code is nothing but a different representation of the bitcoin address, it is easily scannable by a camera and it will automatically insert the right address in the field.

-NFC (near-field-communication): the bitcoin address can be inserted using NFC, putting two devices close to each other. This communication is possible among all devices with an NFC chip. Payments with NFC are easy and intuitive, the merchant only has to activate the NFC and the payment will happen in a seamless manner, simply by putting two devices close enough to each other.

Depending on its phase, a bitcoin payment can assume different states:

Pending: a payment is considered as pending when the payment request has been sent but the payment has not yet been executed.

Received: a payment is considered as received if it has been sent but it has not yet been confirmed by the Bitcoin network. It is good norm for merchants to wait for the payment to be confirmed, before considering the payment as finalized. Before being confirmed, a payment can be rejected by the bitcoin network or the sender can try to carry out a double spending attack.

Confirmed: a payment is considered as such once it has been successfully inserted in the Bitcoin blockchain. It is then to be considered as finalized and cannot be reversed in any way.

ChainsidePay helps you to accept bitcoin payments on your website with the creation of a webPOS. Once the registration phase is completed, it is possible to create a Bitcoin Account, which will be used as a reference to send the bitcoin received from the customers. Then, a webPOS can be created and linked to your website through APIs to accept Bitcoin payments.

Since it is not regulated by central authorities nor governments, the value of bitcoin is calculated based on demand and supply in a particular moment. This is the reason why different exchanges have different prices, because it depends on the demand and supply on their platform. At the moment, the daily fluctuation of bitcoin price is relatively high. The causes count the novelty of the technology, its low market capitalization and the high speculation to which bitcoin is subject to.

The automatic euro conversion service allows the user who receives bitcoin payments to eliminate any risk of volatility, delegating to Chainside the task of converting bitcoins into euros at the exchange rate used at the time of incoming payment, and subsequently receiving a bank transfer on the personal bank account with the equivalent in euros of the bitcoins received. In this way, you can accept bitcoin payments without exposing yourself to capital gains or losses based on the bitcoin price trend after receiving a transaction.

Taking advantage of the euro conversion service requires a KYC procedure and identification of your company. At the moment this service is available by invitation only, if you wish to start using the euro conversion service contact us.

Fees are a payment for the transfer of funds over the bitcoin network and compensate miners for their contribution to the system and protection from double spendings.

The number of transactions that can be included within a block is limited, since it can only weight a maximum of about 2MB. The fee that has to be paid is proportionate to the available space within a block and the size of the transaction, expressed in bytes and is not affected by the amount of funds to be transferred. Depending on the information included, the different operations of a transaction will have a different weight in bytes. For instance, transactions sending more information, such as sending bitcoin to more people at the same time will have a higher weight and will therefore have to pay a higher fee.

The fee market can be  very competitive; since fees are paid to miners, they will prioritize the transactions that pay a higher fee per byte. The higher the fee set and the more likely a miner will include the transaction in a block, confirming it.

The minimum fee necessary to confirm a transaction can vary, depending on the number of people transacting on the Bitcoin network at a specific time. The higher the number of users, the more competition to be included in a block, resulting in higher fees .The optimal fee is usually calculate by your wallet, depending on the level of priority desired. In case of transactions having a higher priority, a higher fee will be set, guaranteeing a faster confirmation.

As an example, we hypothesize that a miner can only include up to 2000 transactions in a block: if there are only 1000 users that wish to transact on the bitcoin network there is minimal competition and all transactions, even those with minimal fees, will be confirmed.

On the other hand, if there are 4000 people that wish to transfer bitcoin, there will be high competition to figure among the 2000 that will get their transactions included within a block. In this scenario, the miner will simply choose the 2000 transactions paying higher fees, creating a sort of auction where all users try to set a high enough commission to be included within a block. This process happen in the background and is not carried out manually by the users. Within each Bitcoin wallet there are specific components, tasked with providing the ideal commission depending on the state of the network at a given time.

No intermediaries: the main advantage of bitcoin is the absence of financial intermediaries. The Bitcoin network is purely peer-to-peer: funds are directly transferred from one user to the other, with no need for third parties or centralized servers. In this way, users have full control over their funds and the transactions they make.

24/7/365: it is possible to send and receive bitcoin everywhere in the world, at any time. There are no restrictions: no bank closing time, no bureaucracy, no borders.

Fast payments: Bitcoin payments are faster than traditional ones, as transactions are confirmed in about 10 minutes. This represent a particular advantage for international transfers, that usually take a couple of days and are subject to high commissions and dependent on the opening times of the institutional intermediaries that carry them out.

Security:  last but not least, Bitcoin offers a higher level of security compared to traditional payments. In fact, it is impossible to modify a Bitcoin transaction once it is included in the blockchain. This offers a guarantee against frauds or chargebacks.  Furthermore, the protocol minimizes the risk of identity theft and allows users to retain full control over your funds. Users can also decide to use other instruments to increase their security, such as the type of wallet to store their funds.

The blockchain is a distributed ledger, shared among all members of the bitcoin network. It is literally a “chain of blocks” and makes it possible to arrange all bitcoin transaction in chronological order. All transactions happening on the blockchain are grouped in blocks, a set of transactions. On average, a new block is added to the blockchain every 10 minutes, through the process of mining.

The main benefit a blockchain is removing any type of intermediary or trusted third party. Since all actors possess a copy of the ledger anyone can do auditing, without having to trust a third party to do so. In this way, it is always possible to be sure that all transactions are legitimate. Furthermore, the ledger cannot be manipulated, as a set of rules and incentives guarantees the cooperation between actors.

Bitcoin is a digital and decentralized currency, created in 2009 by someone going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. It is digital because bitcoin only exists in electronic form and decentralized because, differently than traditional currencies (Euro, Dollar), it is not controlled by a central bank nor a government. In fact, Bitcoin is based on blockchain technology, a decentralized system that, thanks to the use of incentives, guarantees the cooperation among all actors that are part of the network.