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Stripe: Bitcoin

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Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#341

Post by venaoy »

lmm wrote: post #302
RemoteWorker wrote: post #115

I find it hilarious how Bitcoin haters (like the ones we have here on HN) say it's never going to work, but then they spend hours every day trying to talk people out of using it.

The value of these things is a Keynesian beauty contest. If enough people decide that Bitcoin is a valid currency then it is a valid currency (just like baseball cards). I think that would be bad for society. Any new value in the bitcoin ecosystem increases the value held by the early adopters - who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals, and the rest are the miners who enabled them. (bitcoin does have some advan…

> who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals

This is false. And you have no source to prove it. I know a lot of early adopters through various channels. They are geeks, crypto nerds, cypherpunks. Think guys like Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. Nice guys who like to explore new ideas.

Maybe you are just upset that you "missed the boat" on bitcoin or something. But you've got to stop believing every Bitcoin user is a criminal.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#342

Post by simonebrunozzi »

campers wrote: post #241
andrewfong wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it legal to pass the discount onto customers? The only businesses I've seen giving a discount for paying in cash are (some) gas stations.

In Australia its common to have a surchage when paying by credit card.

Even too much. Taxis at Sydney airport sometimes charge you 10% more for using a credit card. That's legalized theft, in my view.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#343

Post by amalcon »

mirimir wrote: post #262
amalcon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishing your entire transaction history for the entire world to see doesn't seem like the best way to have privacy, even if it is under a pseudonym. After all, purchasing history seems like one of the best tools to trace a pseudonym.

We can have as many pseudonyms as we need, and can transfer Bitcoins among them via mixing services. No pseudonym need make more than one purchase. It's the difficulty of anonymous postal delivery that's limiting.

You can do the same thing with USD. It's called money laundering, and was not invented by the Bitcoin community. Granted, for the time being it's a lot easier to do with Bitcoin, but any kind of mass market adoption would surely change this.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#344

Post by bhayden »

amalcon wrote: post #343
mirimir wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can have as many pseudonyms as we need, and can transfer Bitcoins among them via mixing services. No pseudonym need make more than one purchase. It's the difficulty of anonymous postal delivery that's limiting.

You can do the same thing with USD. It's called money laundering, and was not invented by the Bitcoin community. Granted, for the time being it's a lot easier to do with Bitcoin, but any kind of mass market adoption would surely change this.

Money laundering doesn't really solve the problem of being able to buy good digitally without revealing your identity.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#345

Post by davidgerard »

fluffheadsr wrote: post #309
shostack wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Chargebacks are my way of making sure I have a fallback if the merchant fails to live up to their end of the bargain. I use them as an option of absolute last resort, but the few times I have, I've been very glad that I had the option, and that the credit card companies bent over backwards to shield me from the headaches of the issue.

companies who fail to live up to their end of the bargin in a bitcoin world won't survive long. I've been shopping on the internet since the 90's and not once have I had to place a chargeback.. Chargebacks are mostly fraud and people wanting shit for free.. In turn goods become higher priced and that cost is passed onto all the other customers.. Anytime I have been unhappy with an internet purchase the company has al…

>companies who fail to live up to their end of the bargin in a bitcoin world won't survive long.

Yes, just long enough, like Butterfly Labs. (Credit card purchasers: could do a chargeback. Bitcoin purchasers: SOL.)

Chargebacks and reversibility in general are essential to consumers. If shit goes wrong, it's gotta be fixable.

(This is also why nobody actually wants smart contracts. They know that the plot of Dr Strangelove is literally an irreversible smart contract going wrong. Consumers want fixability, business-to-business wants the option of lawyering out of a bad deal. The only people who want smart contracts are the businesses who currently screw over their customers with mandatory arbitration clauses.)

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#346

Post by davidgerard »

grubles wrote: post #240
vacri wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- There are no chargebacks This is a huge negative for the customer, though

Which is why multi-signature transactions eliminate this negative.

What percentage of transactions, in the real (if small) world of buying things with Bitcoin, are multisig?

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#347

Post by davidgerard »

2drew3 wrote: post #164
joncalhoun wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you do it for a percentage greater than your CC rewards if you trusted the seller? For example, Amazon has never screwed me on a single purchase. If I have an issue they fix it, which is a large part of why I often pay 5-10% more for products on Amazon.com instead of XYZ.com. Would you use BTC for a 2% discount with sellers like this?

Purse.io provides 25% discounts to shop on Amazon with bitcoin. Pretty incredible - discount comes from liquidating Amazon gift cards ($15b in circulation).

Yes, it turns out that blatant fraud saves money. The site is a stolen credit card launderer.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#348

Post by davidgerard »

choffman wrote: post #70
wyldfire wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. Which is why some of the newer cryptocurrencies like Monero are gaining some attention.

No, no altcoins are gaining attention.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#349

Post by amalcon »

bhayden wrote: post #344
amalcon wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do the same thing with USD. It's called money laundering, and was not invented by the Bitcoin community. Granted, for the time being it's a lot easier to do with Bitcoin, but any kind of mass market adoption would surely change this.

Money laundering doesn't really solve the problem of being able to buy good digitally without revealing your identity.

All of the things mirmir mentioned are considered money laundering when done with USD, so they either solve that problem for both or for neither. Neither result is an argument in favor of bitcoin, so whether or not they do is immaterial.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#350

Post by gcr »

vertex-four wrote: post #55
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" abstractio…

Why is the choice to accept bitcoins client-side? If I want to force a payment in bitcoins, I can add the attribute myself.

Some businesses have legal ramifications for accepting bitcoin or not, even if it's through Stripe. Is there a flag in your Stripe merchant account on Stripe's server to refuse bitcoins?

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