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Ending Bitcoin Support

stripe.com

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Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#291

Post by nickthemagicman »

koheripbal wrote: post #49
vec wrote: post #18

For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…

Monero is fast as well.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#292

Post by saosebastiao »

beaker52 wrote: post #230

It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO. Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions. The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting…

It looks really promising. Unfortunately, it can only be bought on two relatively unknown exchanges.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#293

Post by JumpCrisscross »

neosavvy wrote: post #196
piyh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jewelry doesn't have inherent value. Guns, cars, food and shelter has inherent value. Gold has been a luxury good long before it had any practical applications.

I do think the value in all these currencies is that it will change the value Banks in general bring to society. If we see a widely traded and daily useful crypto-currency in use for general goods and services, we'll see a deleveraging of the banking system. Right now how often do you exchange a real Dollar or Nickel for goods or services. Chances are your token of exchange is your credit or debit card, with a balanc…

> If we see a widely traded and daily useful crypto-currency in use for general goods and services, we'll see a deleveraging of the banking system

Based on what? Cryptocurrency markets went from zero to doing practically every financial fraud, scam and deception in the book in a matter of months. Excessive leverage? See Tether. Ponzi scheme? See Bitconnect. Backroom dealing to help the well connected? See Ethereum.

Banks don't lever up, lie about the value of their holdings and borrow short to buy long because they're evil and destructive. They do it because there are massive monetary incentives to do those things. Those same incentives are present in cryptocurrencies. The only difference is the regulators haven't tuned in yet.

> banks are no longer keeping the ledger for society

Banking laws would be updated to regulate Coinbase, Bitfinex, et cetera.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#294

Post by WorldMaker »

root_axis wrote: post #187
EnFinlay wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading your comment finally made it click to me why cryptocurrencies (specifically Bitcoin) are distinct from a gold bar or other non-currency stores of value. A gold bar is going to remain a gold bar forever, people's perception of its value will change even though the supply will remain mostly steady, but it will stay a gold bar no matter what. Bitcoin may change in value based on perception, it's supply will rema…

> it's supply will remain constant after it has all been mined Even this could change if the miners and thought-leaders decide that it should.

You can't hard fork gold, either. You don't suddenly wind up with two copies of a gold bar because someone decided to Xerox your ledger to start a new one.

The scarcity of Bitcoins is entirely a cultural delusion.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#295

Post by Brockenstein »

vkou wrote: post #247
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider aluminium. At one point it was more expensive than gold (due to mining+refining challenges). When those were overcome the cost plummeted to it's current "cheap" level. Personally, I think a better comparison is to the diamond trade. Through a series of machinations (price fixing, artificial supply constraint, marketing) diamonds are deeply overvalued if you consider just the fundamentals of them - aka they'r…

But only a one-way retail value. No diamond dealer will give you anything close to their retail price, when you try to sell them diamonds.

Madden games have the same problem.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#296

Post by clarkmoody »

masklinn wrote: post #257
mikeash wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If all the miners are gone, the difficulty has hopefully dropped precipitously AFAIK there is no mechanism for the difficulty of new blocks to fall. And if the only use is creating transactions between yourself and yourself, well you can also collect gravel. > This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable. Even in a sub-industri…

Difficulty falls when block times exceed 10 minutes over the adjustment period. It's happened plenty of times in the history of Bitcoin.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#297

Post by BatFastard »

freeone3000 wrote: post #148
avenoir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?

Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.

Very few cryptocurrencies are anonymous, Bitcoin is NOT. OMG do people really think this still?

Now there are anonymous currencies like Monero.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

sonoffett wrote: post #186
emodendroket wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. Maybe a modern-day alchemist finally figures out the formula. I don't know. Probably far less likely than the Bitcoin scenarios though.

Or asteroid mining

Asteroid mining won't be able to significantly affect prices of gold downwell, definitely not until we bootstrap a real industrial presence in space - with the way we do space today, mission costs would eat up any profit you could make on shipping raw material down.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#299

Post by bdcravens »

We've used the Bitcoin integration since it was in beta (I even got a Stripe t-shirt for pointing out a small bug) but I don't think we've ever received a single Bitcoin payment.

The workflow is too jarring (copy and paste a Bitcoin address to make a payment elsewhere, then come back).

Additionally, refunds are tricky: everything's immediately converted to fiat, so the customer needs to know they won't (or are extremely unlikely to) get the same amount of Bitcoin back.

Obviously these issues are true independent of current fee and transaction time story.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#300

Post by rwcarlsen »

nwah1 wrote: post #281
rwcarlsen wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation.

You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.

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