Hey all. I had an idea that might be useful for merchants to start accepting bitcoins as money.

It's an api or standalone application that store owners can run to effectively turn their bitcoins into recordable cash, easily and beneficially, as well as tracking their growth.

The system would record how many bitcoins they got for what they sold vs how much the bitcoins were worth at the time of sale.  That way, when someone makes a purchase online, it's the for exact same amount as it would have sold for in USD (or other currency).

Easy to read graphs show them how much money they've got available in their wallet, and how much it's growing by riding the bitcoin economy. As they make more money, some of them are going to start buying things with bitcoin, and the whole goods/services economy would experience the rapid growth it desperately needs.

Let's say you could order groceries, or electronics, and instead of paypal, you'd choose something like "bitpal", that would accept the bitcoins, alert the merchant that an order had come in, and logged the transaction at the highest bid (taking depth of bids into acct) in USD.  The merchant would then have control over when they cash out. They could simply get their money from a market like mtgox (but not limited to mtgox) right then, or they can save it and see if it grows in value.  It could be advertised as a method of deflationary insurance.  If USD goes bottom up, at least your company has made an investment in a currency that operates with different rules.  This would mean that bitcoin could potentially move into the mainstream with an economically viable purpose.

I think as long as store owners can easily track their money, they're going to be more open about using a service that offers a very positive track record in valuation.  It's got to be a standalone, easy to use application. These are business owners, not computer nerds.  As far as scalability goes, I think something like this used on a wide scale could make our economy even more valuable.

thoughts?