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Stripe: Bitcoin

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Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#51

Post by lisa_henderson »

The Bitcoin community might want to take a deep breath and recognize where Bitcoin has the most real-world use. The idea that my mom will someday use Bitcoin to buy books online is about as realistic as the belief that, any minute now, youngsters will realize that the daily newspaper is better read in paper form, because of the texture and experience and the anonymity of paper. For that matter, I am a computer programmer, and I love to play with new technologies, and I'm utterly unable to imagine why I'd ever want to pay with anything with Bitcoin.

There are a large number of people living in China who would like to get around the nation's currency controls. There are a large number of people living in Russia that want to move money without being tracked. There are a large number of people living in Latin America who want to avoid taxes in their own countries. This is what drives the use of Bitcoin. The only large scale need for Bitcoin is criminal activity, in China, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere.

Currency regulated by the government is a classic "good enough" product. It might lack some features that would be nice, but 99% of the public doesn't seem to care. Rather, they want more money, but they don't want to change money. If they had real doubts about the currency, they would dump it in exchange for real goods. But instead, most people work hard to acquire more money, and they show no real concern with the standard proxies for currency (credit cards, checks, etc).

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#52

Post by brentm »

benjamindc wrote: post #9
manuelflara wrote: post #7

I absolutely love the little animated step by step process shown of how it works. Is this done with an open source library?

I'm just using a tiny lib that makes things easier: https://github.com/bendc/animate Other than that, it's just vanilla js/css.

It looks great. Would love to see a blog post explaining your methodology.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#53

Post by Animats »

"Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars." Looks like another Coinbase reseller. Coinbase has a merchant program. They guarantee their buy price of Bitcoin for a minute or two, to cover the volatility between when the web site accepts the Bitcoins and Coinbase dumps them on an exchange. During periods of high volatility, this service is sometimes suspended.

Many shopping cart programs already accept Bitcoins and convert them through Coinbase. Few merchants accept Bitcoins and accept the conversion risk themselves. This kind of service has been available for the last year. It's used a little, but not much.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#54

Post by curiously »

I just don't think this is useful unless you were offering a service that only works with bitcoins. The wide adoption won't change Bitcoin, it's the unpredictable and manipulative market pricing that makes me hesitant to accept it.

With USD you know that if you got 100 it won't turn into $10 in a few weeks but the reality with bitcoin is that the threat exists

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#55

Post by vertex-four »

mrb wrote: post #22

Stripe's Terms of Service reveal that they use Coinbase in the backend to transact and exchange the bitcoins: https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms If you are a small merchant planning to do less than $1-2 million dollars in sales, you might still prefer using Coinbase directly instead of Stripe though, because Coinbase waives all fees until the first $1 million dollars (then it's 1%), but Stripe charges a constant 0.5% f…

You can integrate bitcoin support into Stripe Checkout with just a few lines of code - one attribute on the client, and 2-3 lines of extra code to create your Charge object in a different way on the server, at which point you process it in almost exactly the same way as a card payment (potentially minus some UI details in confirmation messages, etc).

Integrating Coinbase involves writing your own "payment" abstraction in place of being able to use Stripe's all the way through your application, then implementing both Stripe and Coinbase on top of that. While this might be good in the long run (so you can switch off of Stripe easily), it's not so good for smaller shops/services which don't need that complexity yet.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#56

Post by tonyhb »

venaoy wrote: post #35
JohnTHaller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem with mainstream consumer adoption is the fact that mainstream consumers don't have any bitcoins to spend. 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, Canad…

> you have to use an exchange to buy the coins No you don't. You can sell stuff on Craigslist for bitcoins. You can mine. You can buy coins in person from a friend/from localbitcoins. You can receive remittance from your oversea family in bitcoins. You can buy them from a Bitcoin ATM. Etc. There are tons of ways to acquire bitcoins without "having" to use an exchange.

Shameless plug, you can also get paid with bitcoins via https://www.incoin.io/. We need more of this. I'd be happy to see another proper payroll company with the option to pay via bitcoin.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#57

Post by cca »

roasbeef wrote: post #20

Disappointed to see that they don't appear any PaymentProtocol[1] integration. [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawi...

(I work at Stripe.) We love the PaymentProtocol, and we have an integration internally. Because the protocol is fairly new, we want to gauge demand from our users before exposing the extra infrastructure.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#58

Post by veryluckyxyz »

aet wrote: post #46
veryluckyxyz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe (in this case) receives bitcoins and it is exposed to fluctuations. So, if Stripe guarantees the seller a price for the bitcoin, I would think that Stripe has a mechanism to limit or even eliminate the risk from that exposure. I am interested in learning how Stripe does it. Do you know how Stripe does it?

Can they do the conversion realtime and charge the client whatever rate they get?

Perhaps, but they don't say it explicitly. For example, Bitpay says (at https://bitpay.com/)

` Charge $1, get $1 Instant conversion, no transaction fee, and bank deposits in US Dollars, Euros, GBP, CAD and more. We take the bitcoin exchange rate risk, your customers get the best rate on the market, and you get a payment you can count on, every time. `

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#59

Post by wyldfire »

deweller wrote: post #30
patrickaljord wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> should I buy bitcoins with my dollars when I can just pay with my dollars directly? Cheaper fees (0.5% vs 2.9%) can be potentially passed on to consumers. And anonymity.

bitcoin's not really that anonymous. Sure, the ledger doesn't contain identities, but it's not extremely difficult for the mapping between addresses and identities to "leak" and once they do, it's anything but anonymous.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#60

Post by josu »

patrickaljord wrote: post #27
adriancooney wrote: post #17

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…

It may not be that appealing for a dollar/euro economies, but for emerging markets where their currency is not that stable and average inflation is around 3-5% it could have great potential.
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