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Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

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Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#171

Post by JohnTHaller »

antr wrote: post #69
josephlord wrote: post #53

The interesting part of this from my point of view is how Stripe will manage the conversion of received bitcoin back into dollars. Will they directly sell bitcoin to consumers themselves or trade on one (or more) of the exchanges. Stripe are obviously taking the risk of the volatility so will probably want to keep the bitcoin float that they hold fairly small. They also need to keep a reasonable margin on these trans…

i'm going to guess that they will exchange at spot and take a small transaction fee. having bitcoin on your balance sheet (volatility-wise) is not the wisest move for a startup.

having bitcoin on your balance sheet (volatility-wise) is not the wisest move for most companies.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#172

Post by aianus »

Nursie wrote: post #159
gnaritas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety for the merchant. First off, funds don't need to be checked, there is not a card status or funds available, address is not necessary so all of those things are problems cards have that Bitcoin doesn't; they aren't relevant. It is just as safe to accept a 0 confirmation transaction as it is to accept a credit card. In both cases, the transaction could be essentially reversed either by a double spend or by a cha…

>> Safety for the merchant. Sorry, but f*ck the merchant. We have thousands of years of history of consumers being ripped off by merchants. Laws and payment methods have spent the last few decades arranging themselves on the consumer's side and you want to rebalance evrything in favour of the people who have (historically and continually) been ripping the rest of us off? No thanks.

This insurance is not free. I want the option of saving the 3% interchange when I'm dealing with a merchant I trust, like Amazon.com for example.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#173

Post by cstejerean »

jdh wrote: post #155
Tossrock wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those 10 million households are going to have their problems solved by bitcoin.

Maybe not in the next few years. But people who pay with cash because they aren't allowed to be in this country and don't want a bank account (some portion of the unbanked) might enjoy shopping in the digital world by using some "digital cash".

They can already shop in the digital world with prepaid Visa, Master Card or even AmEx cards. Going after people without bank accounts is big business.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#174

Post by hw »

Bitcoin aside, Stripe has been an awesome landing page factory IMO. Love watching them churn out landing page after landing page (Checkout, Marketplaces, and now one for Bitcoin)

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#175

Post by awfycooper »

jypepin wrote: post #40
tomasien wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe is fantastic at building interfaces and APIs for payment processing - the fact that they could lead the move away from CC's (on which they built their business up until now) is thrilling to me. Step 1!

I don't know Stripe enough to draw any conclusion on that, would you see Stripe becoming a Paypal like, where you could just have an account, link your CC, BTC, whatever you want, and then have a button "Pay with Stripe"?

We almost provide that today with Checkout. If you've used Checkout on a website before, you can easily pay on another site without entering your CC info again.

https://stripe.com/checkout

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#176

Post by wakeless »

aestra wrote: post #142
hnnewguy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to tap my card and leave. Then don't. No one forces you. Use signature only, or "chip and pin".

No, but I'd rather not have my credit cards have that option in them. Basically, I do not like the fact someone can tap my card and then get money from it. I just am not a fan of that type of payment, because it is too easy. I don't like the argument "don't use it" because it isn't an optional "feature," if your card has it, it has it. You cannot turn it off. http://www.mymoneycoach.ca/credit_rating/how-to-protect-se…

Credit cards have little wire antenna in them. If you basically cut it in down near the chip, the chip still works when inserted into the machine but the NFC doesn't work.

I did this accidentally and have been using my phone with chip and pin for about a year.

Personally I'd prefer to swipe.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#177

Post by grey-area »

gnaritas wrote: post #154
grey-area wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is equivalent to a 0 confirmation transaction, so no it's not a difference. The CC issuer is queried for the card status, funds available, address etc, and transactions are accepted or declined based on that information. Sometimes there's even an extra verification step directly contacting the issuers bank to check a passcode (SecureCode), and all that is reversible afterward if a mistake or fraud is detected.…

Safety for the merchant. First off, funds don't need to be checked, there is not a card status or funds available, address is not necessary so all of those things are problems cards have that Bitcoin doesn't; they aren't relevant. It is just as safe to accept a 0 confirmation transaction as it is to accept a credit card. In both cases, the transaction could be essentially reversed either by a double spend or by a cha…

If it's 0 confirmation, what exactly is checked?

I'm not convinced vendors are the important party here, they are making a sale and the onus is on them to provide an easy method of payment. Convincing customers to give up the protections of CCs or other digital cash payments would be a very hard battle. Escrow is not a viable alternative to verified identities in transactions, and for most consumers the slim advantages of Bitcoin are far outweighed by the numerous disadvantages.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#178

Post by runeks »

kalleboo wrote: post #99
hendzen wrote: post #76

Awesome. Now to see how their integration works with regards to confirmation time. The best solution IMO is to use a risk analyzer to determine the number of needed confirmations. 0 conf for small payments for a merchant with a low fraud rate, with increasing confirmations needed as the size of the payment grows. I would look at BitPay's checkout flow to see the state of the art here. Also hoping they implement the p…

> The best solution IMO is to use a risk analyzer to determine the number of needed confirmations As I understand it, you can still feel pretty safe with 0 confirmations if you're monitoring the bitcoin network for double-spend attempts over the average network propagation time. If you don't see any double-spend attempts anywhere on the net by the time most of the net has seen your transaction, you're probably good.…

> There are a lot of hidden pitfalls in bitcoin security (such as - the above isn't guaranteed, if miners change their mind to be greedy and pick the transaction with the highest fee instead of the first one, that method breaks) so I'm not sure if it's bulletproof though.

Keep in mind that enabling this also opens up a counter-attack, against double spending: if User A sends 1 BTC to you with a fee of 0.0001 BTC, and you discover that, after sending this transaction to you, he sends the same 1 BTC to another address, this time with a 0.1 BTC fee, you can create a new transaction that spends the 1 BTC originally sent to you (with the 0.0001 BTC fee) which spends everything as a fee in this new transaction.

This way you don't actually get the money, the miners do, but you punish double spending. And if miners are greedy - and want to include whichever transaction makes them the most money - they will want include to include yours, as this makes them a whole 1 BTC in fees.

So in the end, while it may seem that miners including the highest-fee transaction increases the risk of double spending, it might actually prevent it, since merchants will also gain an effective way of punishing it.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#179

Post by runeks »

wdewind wrote: post #113
netcan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this statement. It's controversial that an extra cost attached to every transaction in a big wide chunk of the economy will bring up costs to consumers. It's not very different to sales tax.

No, it's completely different from sales tax because while the company will have slightly increased costs (usually ~2.5%), they will also move significantly more inventory which will allow quicker reinvestment cycles, and thus more growth. This is the value of credit/debt in general: assuming everyone trusts everyone else transaction volume can greatly increase. And that trust comes from the credit card companies.

I think the point is that if we can replace credit cards with a no-fee payment method, merchants will save 3% on every transaction. Of course, it has to be as easy for the consumer as credit cards (which I think Bitcoin can become).

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

#180

Post by runeks »

piokoch wrote: post #24
tomasien wrote: post #4

The concept that Stripe may be moving away from strictly supporting Credit Card payments (which are awful, but necessary for now) and into alternatives is so exciting to me that I am literally shaking. We're building infrastructure to make bank-to-bank transfers palatable to consumers and drive their cost toward zero, but it's only if thought leaders like the Collisons embrace the move away from CC's that the move wi…

"which are awful, but necessary for now". I am not sure what is exactly that awful in having free credit for X days, rewards for making purchases (which effectively cancels fees) and, the most important thing, chargebacks. I can understand Credit Card issues from seller point of view, but for clients (that is most of us), they are not that bad. Bitcoin will have to provide the same level of consumer comfort and safet…

> Bitcoin will have to provide the same level of consumer comfort and safety to have wider adoption.

I think I know what you mean by that statement, but I want to make claer that Bitcoin (the protocol) should never provide this. This is like wanting to build guarantee-of-delivery into the IP protocol. It's completely unnecessary and counter-productive.

We want to preserve the ability to send funds to people where chargebacks aren't required, just as we want to be able to send data to people where guarantee-of-delivery isn't required.

Stripe, BitPay, Coinbase, PayPal etc. should be the ones who choose to provide chargeback services.

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