Inspiration
Bitcoin has enormous potential to change the financial ecosystem of the world. As someone with a passion for this technology, I hoped to develop an application around it at HackMIT.
What it does
BitInvoice offers the user a template for a basic invoice. In addition to basic details that one may find on an invoice template, this template generator is hooked up to the Coinbase API to generate a new bitcoin address for each invoice created. Each one of these individual addresses belongs to the Coinbase wallet that the user owns. Any small business owner with a Coinbase account would have the ability to generate infinite invoices for their customers that would be quick and free of hassle for both parties.
How we built it
BitInvoice is a web application that was developed in Python on the Flask web framework. For the bitcoin part of the project I used the Coinbase API. I used a number of python libraries for things like QR code generation and PDF generation.
Challenges we ran into
Having not had much experience working with APIs, this project was certainly challenging in this regard, though I did learn a lot from it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having a working application was immensely satisfying. Especially so because it is a bitcoin application that serves a valuable purpose.
What we learned
I developed my abilities in programming with Python throughout this project. Specifically, I became a lot more comfortable with the Flask web framework, and gained a better understanding for APIs.
What's next for BitInvoice
BitInvoice has a lot of potential capabilities. The next step is implementing an automated billing system in which the recipient of the invoice has a certain amount of time to pay their bill before automatic contract termination. There are also many other exciting opportunities for how to integrate bitcoin into the world of international business-to-business commerce, BitInvoice is only a start.
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