09 May 2015 / Mycelium Gear – Mycelium proudly announces the release of its first online service, Mycelium Gear, based on the Straight Server developed by Roman Snitko, who has joined our team and is now leading this project.
Mycelium Gear is a merchant processor which demonstrates something that has never been possible before Bitcoin: the ability for merchants to use a full featured merchant processor to receive payments online, and have the money go straight into their own wallets, even if that wallet is running on their own phone in their pocket. Mycelium Gear does not hold any money on the merchant’s behalf, meaning there are no days of waiting for the money to arrive into your bank account, no risk of money being lost by the merchant processor, no need to fill out applications where you give out tons or personal information, and no complicated restrictive policies. All of this means that the costs of running this service are almost zero, which is also what it costs for you to use it: it’s absolutely free. It’s simplicity also means that it’s very easy to set up: you can have it up and running on your site within minutes.
Mycelium Gear relies on the unique benefits of BIP32 HD wallets, which use a single unique random number, called a seed, to generate a list of public bitcoin addresses (called an xpub key), and a corresponding list of private keys (xpriv key) for each of those addresses. When using Mycelium Gear, you give it only the xpub key that generates a unique bitcoin address for each customer invoice, while you keep the private xpriv key – the part that actually allows you to spend that money – only in your own wallet. Mycelium Gear also allows you to set your prices in other currencies, such as USD and EUR, and automatically adjust the amount of bitcoin for the invoice based on the bitcoin price at the time of purchase. When a purchase is made, Mycelium Gear presents the customer with an invoice with a bitcoin address to send their payment to. When the invoice is paid, Mycelium Gear monitors the public Bitcoin blockchain and notifies the merchant’s web store when a payment is detected. Since all bitcoin payment addresses are those of the merchant’s own private wallet, Mycelium Gear never needs to interact with any money directly. More details here https://gear.mycelium.com/
