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What is the "open wallet" step? That can't mean I have to have a wallet with Stripe, can it?
Stripe doesn't have a Bitcoin wallet for consumers.
There is a tad more info from https://twitter.com/stripe :
"Our Bitcoin support is now fully live: https://stripe.com/bitcoin ."
"It's fully-integrated with the rest of Stripe: same APIs, same reporting, same dashboard. (Just like our Alipay support.)"
"While testing our Bitcoin support, we had people from 60 different countries use it to pay. (Howdy, Guatemala, Algeria, Rwanda, Cambodia!)"
"Particular thanks to @Namecheap, @Tarsnap, @HandUp, and @Grooveshark for their feedback as we developed this."
"And as for https://stripe.com/bitcoin itself -- this is our first, but hopefully not last, page to feature an animated Vim."
For the record, Stripe's Bitcoin support has been in beta since March 2014. Tarsnap were the first users: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.h...
Edit: @ThrustVectoring: it does not take 5 weeks of a developer's time to integrate with Coinbase, especially for the "small" merchants (<$1-2M in sales) that my comment was written for. But I agree the appeal of simplicity if you already take Stripe is there :)
What a fantastic product page. After less that 30 seconds, I knew exactly what Stripe was doing with Bitcoin, how to use the new feature and integrate it. This is great news for Bitcoin. If all it takes is one extra line of code for online retailers to start accepting the currency, widespread adoption could sky rocket. That's always been Bitcoin's crutch, simple integration. Others like Coinbase and Bitpay have made…
What a fantastic product page. After less that 30 seconds, I knew exactly what Stripe was doing with Bitcoin, how to use the new feature and integrate it. This is great news for Bitcoin. If all it takes is one extra line of code for online retailers to start accepting the currency, widespread adoption could sky rocket. That's always been Bitcoin's crutch, simple integration. Others like Coinbase and Bitpay have made…
It can be useful for people who either don't have access to credit cards but have access to bitcoins, people who already have a lot of bitcoins and curious tech people.
> Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction. There are no other fees. Beautiful
Yes, but of course the exchange rate matters as well. It's trivial for Bitcoin payment processors hide an extra "fee" in the exchange rate by giving you a worse exchange rate than you'd get at Bitcoin exchanges and pocketing the difference. (I have no idea if Stripe does that or not)
Honestly, this may be what it takes to see more mainstream consumer adoption. A lot of the apps with high levels of penetration in this generalized demographic seem to use Stripe--if it's truly a frictionless integration, it will be really interesting to see the market's response. Coinbase & exchange API's were the first step. Single-script hosted payment processing with a UI focus (accessible to tech and grassroots…
Then there's the fact that you have to use an exchange to buy the coins in the first place and... let's just say bitcoin exchanges aren't exactly known as secure financial institutions. It seems a large bitcoin exchange is hacked and shuts down just about weekly:
Just hours ago: Cavritex, Canada's largest bitcoin exchange, announced that it was hacked and will shut down
4 days ago: BTER of China was hacked and lost $1.75m
Last week: Exco.in was hacked, apparently lost all customer-held coins, and shut down
Last week: Hong Kong's MyCoin died and was apparently a ponzi scheme that had $387
And that's not even counting the abrupt closures of other exchanges telling users to get their funds out ASAP or lose them.
What a fantastic product page. After less that 30 seconds, I knew exactly what Stripe was doing with Bitcoin, how to use the new feature and integrate it. This is great news for Bitcoin. If all it takes is one extra line of code for online retailers to start accepting the currency, widespread adoption could sky rocket. That's always been Bitcoin's crutch, simple integration. Others like Coinbase and Bitpay have made…
I think the crutch now is not that it's hard to acquire bitcoins (thanks to coinbase and friends) or pay with bitcoin (thanks to stripe and friends), no, the only crutch is why should I buy bitcoins with my dollars when I can just pay with my dollars directly? It can be useful for people who either don't have access to credit cards but have access to bitcoins, people who already have a lot of bitcoins and curious tec…
Cheaper fees (0.5% vs 2.9%) can be potentially passed on to consumers.
And anonymity.