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.
