Did you catch the price on those carrots? 45BTC for a bunch?

Easiest for merchants would be for the payment processing provider to do any conversions needed.

A widget where the merchant specifies the type and amount of currency the merchant wants.

All details of what the customer gives to the processing-provider is between the customer and the processing provider.

For the merchant the only effect a customer's choice of payment method/currency has is the customer's perception of the price. The higher the overhead or customer-perception of overhead the processing-provider places on the conversion of the customer's chosen currency payment-method into the merchant's chosen currency the worse the prices are likely to appear to the customer.

On the other hand the more obscure the currency or method the customer wants to use the less likely it probably is that other merchants can be bought from via such a method or currency.

From a merchant perspective the best payment method to use is probably the one that gives the customer the largest range of options, so the merchant doesn't have to implement many different interfaces.

Presumably in the competition among payment-processing providers how wide a range of options they can offer to customers and to merchants and how little overhead their service imposes on prices as seen by customers are two of their major selling points?

This approach lets the currency trading and speculating be done by the payment processing service.

It also frees merchants from worry about the price of coins or rupees or whatever the customer chooses to pay with changing during the transaction. The payment processor will pay the merchant the price the merchant set in the currency the merchant set. Whether they accept sexual favours or icecream cones or lottery tickets or dollars or bitcoins or whatever from the customer isn't' really the merchant's problem worry or concern except insofar as it might influence the customer's perception of the price as being high or low or good or competitive or uncompetitive.

-MarkM-

What's with the retarded thread title BioMike?

Bitmunchies is an awesome idea, however, I'd really like to be able to find out the shipping costs without creating an account.

Please let us know how this experiment goes.

I posted an idea similar to this a few times...rather than use the dollar or any inflated fiat currency, make up a new unit of account that is indexed to some basket of basic goods (I suggested indexing basic foods you'd find at a grocery store that one would need to survive for a day).  1 or 10 of these could roughly equate to what the average person would need to feed themselves for a day.  You could base your pricing on this unit but use bitcoins or anything else for actual payment.  This unit would also have utility for contracts (loans could be made in terms of this unit (but settled with bitcoins) to avoid the risks that bitcoin volatility poses to such contracts).