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Ending Bitcoin Support

stripe.com

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Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#281

Post by nwah1 »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #274
nwah1 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment amounts to "I don't know why anyone would use X when they can use these other two things that are fundamentally the same."

His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.

Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#282

Post by ChrisClark »

gizmo385 wrote: post #25
glesperance wrote: post #3

Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Too bad they aren't replacing this with another cryptocurrency at the moment.

> Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Can someone bother explaining what this actually means? 3 weeks ago everyone is hype about how Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency and now that it's tanking and vendors are dropping it like a hot potato, its no longer a transactional currency and it's now a "store of value".

3 weeks ago Bitcoin was just as horrible to use for payments as it is now. Just no one investing in it knew that, at all. I'm sure it will be around for a long time as an investment, but they refuse to innovate.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#283

Post by Klathmon »

PeterisP wrote: post #270
Klathmon wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I could certainly connect my own lightning node to the endurance lightning hub, but no one could pay me through that hub because the hub would first have to commit its own funds to its side of a payment channel with me. It won't do that... "hubs" are incentivized to open channels, because they can charge fees for any transactions that go "through" them. Locking up some BTC for a short amount of time (roughly 3 days…

Can you elaborate on how locking works ? Mainly, does it require a BTC transaction (+fee) or not?

yes, it requires a transaction on the blockchain (with TX fees) to open a channel. But once a channel is open, you can keep it open forever (assuming the person you opened the channel with is willing).

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#284

Post by nebulous1 »

kss238 wrote: post #162
nebulous1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's pretty high too these days (not compared to Bitcoin of course) https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee...

Since many of ethereums transactions are from smart contract that use lots of gas, looking at the average transaction fee is misleading. Check ethgasstation.info for the transaction cost of a simple transaction. $0.08 will get you confirmed in the next block, and $0.02 will get you confirmed in 15 min.

That's fair, but that is just the cost right now though. The gas price necessary to get into the next few blocks has varied a lot over the past couple of months. Ethereum is definitely not immune to transaction cost difficulties as currently designed.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#285

Post by ChristianBundy »

swanson wrote: post #256

Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communicati…

FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#286

Post by marshray »

makomk wrote: post #222
marshray wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange live cattle futures contract is deliverable, whereas the Bitcoin contract is settled in US dollars. I.e., the biggest US commodities exchange literally considers live cattle to be more practical to deliver than Bitcoin. To me this suggests Bitcoin is not actually a good medium of exchange. http://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/CME/II/100/101/101.pdf https://www.cmegroup.com/conflue…

It might actually be the other way around. If you want Bitcoins in (say) six month's time, you can just go out and buy Bitcoins now, so it doesn't make much sense to have Bitcoin futures contracts except as a means of speculation on the price and that doesn't benefit from actual delivery. This isn't nearly so easy or practical if you want a certain number of live beef cattle of a certain quality in six months or a ye…

The Euro and GBP contracts are delivered 'physically', not cash-settled in USD:

http://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/CME/III/250/261/261.pdf

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#287

Post by kibwen »

mikeash wrote: post #229
masklinn wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. They've already noted that: > people's perception of its value will change But as they say, a gold bar will remain a gold bar, until and unless it is actively destroyed. Not so for bitcoins, which only remain so as long as they're actively maintained (not just individual coins but the mining networks which allows the creation of new transactions)

I’m not entirely convinced, although I’m partway there. When you “have” a Bitcoin, that means you have the private key to a wallet which the blockchain says has such-and-such amount in it. You can have that even if the miners all disappear. You can still use it to sign transactions, although they won’t get confirmed. You can even confirm them by mining a new block yourself with your transactions in it. (If all the mi…

> it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable

Nah, if civilization collapses then you'll still be able to use your bar of gold to bash in someone's skull and steal their canned beans (which, in the grim solar-flare induced darkness of 2020, will be worth their weight in bitcoins).

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#288

Post by TeMPOraL »

nulagrithom wrote: post #44
montrose wrote: post #15

This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But t…

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration…

The difference between Bitcoin and gold isn't in how either stores value. It's in maintenance costs.

For gold to retain value, you need to maintain human civilization, so that gold can be used in trade. For Bitcoin, you have to maintain it too, plus you need to keep paying an unbounded, ever-increasing, absurdly high price in energy use. This is IMO why cryptocurrencies are a serious problem, and also why they're unsustainable in the long run.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#289

Post by vec »

bactrian wrote: post #72

Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it. This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards. As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.

I run a midsize ecommerce site and, from where I'm sitting, Stripe looks at least as essential in a crypto economy as they are now.

We don't want to handle the mechanics of refunds. We don't want to handle the mechanics of disputes. We don't want to get scammed because we screwed up some small detail of our payment layer. We certainly don't want to do our internal accounting in more than one currency, crypto or otherwise. We're a tech company, not a financial services firm.

From our perspective trusting a third party is a feature not a bug. It means less work for us and less surface area that we could conceivably screw up, and I for one am happy to pay a small premium for the extra insulation.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#290

Post by lawn »

pitaj wrote: post #56

BCH fees are in the $0.25 range right now. I wonder if they considered BCH. They could probably pretty easily implement it with their existing BTC infrastructure.

That number is much too high. The average is much higher than for usual transactions because many wallets are overpaying and very large transactions with many outputs and inputs are driving it up.

$0.01 transactions (or 1 sat/byte) transactions will confirm in the next block. This is lower than for Litecoin or Ethereum.

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