The big Bitcoin news this week comes from NCR Corporation who just announced plans to integrate Bitcoin payments into point of sale systems internationally. This announcement continues to bolster adoption by opening up more avenues for merchants to connect with consumers with Bitcoin.

Developers will be overjoyed to hear the XChange Java Library now supports Coinsetter (add to its 50+ exchange APIs.) BitPay is joining Coinbase as a payment processor for Intuit QuickBooks Online PayByCoin.

Infographics everywhere with a small demographics survey from #GotCrypto, and an interesting Purse.io graphic that looks at what people purchase with bitcoins.

NCR to support Bitcoin for small business point-of-sale

NCR Corporation plans to add bitcoin payment support to its cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) system by the end of 2014, and the support will be free to merchants, reports Yahoo! Finance.

Merchants need only register with a bitcoin processor (such as BitPay or Coinbase) merchants will need only activate bitcoin as a payment option on the back-end. Customers, of course, will simply need a bitcoin wallet app to interact with participating merchants.

NCR represents a solid chunk of business electronic transactions, reporting that its systems enable more than 485 million transactions daily across retail, financial, travel, hospitality, telecom and technology, and small business. Combined with ever increasing adoption of Bitcoin across the market—the number of consumer bitcoin wallets in the wild increased seven-fold 2013 to 2014 to 5.3 million up from 765 thousand, according to a CoinDesk report. Over Q3 2014 alone, 1.2 million bitcoin wallets were created.

This will continue to expand the options that wallet-owners can choose from.

XChange Bitcoin Java Library now supports Coinsetter

Bitcoin developer news continues get more press with Coinsetter support being added to the XChange Bitcoin Java Library, a Java library that provides a streamlined API for trading across different bitcoin exchanges.

Coinsetter made API news before in June’s Bitcoin Weekly by releasing a bevy of new features.

The XChange library can connect over 30 different Bitcoin and altcoin exchanges including BTC-E, CampBX, Coinbase, Kraken, and OKCoin, Cryptsy. Some exchanges permit more functionality than others, but most do provide market data and other information. With the XChange library Java programmers can produce apps that interact with these exchanges, provide data to end users, and in some cases automate actions.

The XChange Java Library is available with the MIT License, provides a consistent API, is easily deployed (via instance of an Exchange object) and provides polling and streaming data models. The project is under active development, depends minimally on 3rd party libraries, and has extensive support.

Interested developers should check the GitHub repository or the project’s homepage.

Intuit partners BitPay for bitcoin processing in QuickBooks Online PayByCoin

Yesterday, BitPay announced that Intuit would be adding integration with the bitcoin payment processor to QuickBooks Online via the PayByCoin service. Merchants with a BitPay account can now seamlessly accept bitcoin payments from clients, and receive  a next-day settlement to their bank account.

PayByCoin is a system added to Quickbooks by Intuit and Coinbase in June of this year.

The #GotCrypto project quick and dirty demographic study of Bitcoin and Dogecoin communities

The blog YoCrypto ran a pair of surveys over 48 hours across several Bitcoin and Dogecoin communities—including Facebook, Reddit, Google+, and Bitcoin Talk forums—and the results are finally in.

The sample size is a little small to be useful, 88 Bitcoin respondents and 98 Dogecoin respondents, but the results could still be fun to examine for the community.

Both groups show a solid bell curve when it comes to age distribution with both Bitcoin and Dogecoin holding the majority in the 25-34 age range (33% for Bitcoin and 34.7% for Dogecoin.) Both Bitcoin and Dogecoin show a strong majority of male users with men weighing in at 84.1% of Bitcoin respondents with women making up only 15.9%; Dogecoin came in very similar at 89.8% men and 10.2% women.

When it comes to “are people purchasing goods or services with this cryptocurrency,” Bitcoin users showed a 14.5% higher likelihood they’d used Bitcoin to purchase services or products. Even with the small sample size, the revelation here is that Dogecoin has a solid merchant trade market that can support 66 of 98 (67.3%) people using the coin to trade. Bitcoin came out with a 81.8% response rate.

The USA dominated both Bitcoin and Dogecoin when asking where cryptocurrency enthusiasts lived. However, this could likely be just as much an artifact of the communities polled and the languages used.

And finally, it appears that both Bitcoin and Dogecoin respondents find technology and sports amid their top interests (with a skew towards tech for Bitcoiners.) TV and gaming seemed to win out for Dogecoin with 12.2% versus Bitcoin at 5.6%.

And, of course, last but not least the Bitcoin community found essentially zilch top interest in Dogecoin (at 0% respondents) and Dogecoin came in at 7.1%.

What do Bitcoiners Buy? From Purse.io

Image via Purse.io.

Purse.io offers Amazon.com purchases at a discount when using bitcoin–it acts as an Amazon marketplace and uses bitcoin transactions to save money for purchasers by passing purchases through other users. The service works essentially like an escrow service facilitating trade of Amazon goods for bitcoin between two parties (with a discount as incentive.)

To make this work, Purse.io connects Amazon purchasers with people willing to buy the items for them. To start the process a purchaser sets up a wish list, preps it on Amazon, and submits it to Purse.io along with a desired discount (average around 15%). The system then finds a buyer who purchases the wishlist and ships it using the “gift” function (to keep the purchaser’s address private)