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Stripe: Bitcoin

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Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#181

Post by celticninja »

bduerst wrote: post #139
venaoy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world's simplest reasons why you might pay something using bitcoins is simply when this is the only way, or cheapest way, or safest way to make a transaction. Example #1: some merchants are hit really hard with fraud, such as intangible goods paid by international credit card transactions. So hard that they decided to stop selling internationally. These merchants discover that Bitcoin re-enables them to sell inte…

Hmmm, some of these hypotheticals are wishful thinking. For example 1, it's a double edged sword. As a seller, no international chargebacks sounds like a wet dream! As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver? Example 2 seems legit for now. If and when bitcoin becomes more mainstream, you'll see an increased transactional cost from overhead and risk mi…

>...and eventually gave me my money back. How many Mt. Gox users got their money back?

these are not the same situation and I think it is disingenous to act like it is.

A comparable situation is that when you had your card skimmed and locked up you had to go say 3 days without access to your funds until a new card turned up, and again lets be charitable and say your bank refunded you within 2 weeks. so you were inconvenienced for 3 days and out of pocket for 14 days. if you paid with bitcoin you would not be locked out of your wallet or at risk of further loss, or need to call your bank. now when you scale that up to something like the recent hack at target that resulted in 1000's of stolen CC details along with personal info resulting in a lot of potential for identity theft and CC fraud. If those buyer had all paid in BTC there would be no theft or fraud possible, no need to try and attack the organisation as list of BTC addresses and customer names and addresses are of no use. they may seek to steal the companies bitcoins but securing properly one small area of your network is much easier than securing a huge sprawling network that covers a whole host of functions, where sensitive data is liberally spread around, making for a lot of vectors of attack.

Now Mt Gox is comparable to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, do you know how many of those investors got their money back?

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#182

Post by scrollaway »

StavrosK wrote: post #103
venaoy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world's simplest reasons why you might pay something using bitcoins is simply when this is the only way, or cheapest way, or safest way to make a transaction. Example #1: some merchants are hit really hard with fraud, such as intangible goods paid by international credit card transactions. So hard that they decided to stop selling internationally. These merchants discover that Bitcoin re-enables them to sell inte…

It took me no less than one hour to pay for a flight the other day, because of various cc-related problems, not the least of which being the train wreck that is Verified by Visa. I so, so wished for a Bitcoin option...

I spent the past three days trying to buy a conference ticket. My card wouldn't get accepted, my bank was being incompetent and unhelpful, claiming they weren't seeing any charges pop up.

I didn't even think of it until your post, yet I was still involved in this not five hours ago. When you look back, it's surprising the amount of artificial shit we have to sift through with CCs.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#183

Post by freework »

sah88 wrote: post #145
cca wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Christian from Stripe here.) We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed. The time-delay between when the customer pushes the transaction and when we notify our users is typically less than 15 seconds and almost always less than 60 seconds.

What happens if it does not get confirmed. Do you debit the account by an equivalent amount or eat it?

its very easy to predict if a transaction will confirm.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#184

Post by bduerst »

venaoy wrote: post #168
bduerst wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, some of these hypotheticals are wishful thinking. For example 1, it's a double edged sword. As a seller, no international chargebacks sounds like a wet dream! As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver? Example 2 seems legit for now. If and when bitcoin becomes more mainstream, you'll see an increased transactional cost from overhead and risk mi…

> As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver? Sometimes reversibility just doesn't matter. The merchant might be 100% trustworthy (like Amazon). Or as another example I once rented a VPS for a month from Russia. I paid in bitcoins because it was $3 or $4 so I simply didn't care if the VPS provider didn't deliver (submitting a chargeback request for su…

Spinning a lack of reversible transactions as being a "Benefit" is disingenuous because there is real demand for them. You're can't always do business with trusted merchants like Amazon, especially internationally.

The point for #3 is that "How can I use these bitcoins I've been gifted?" is not a real problem for the majority of people. It's a solution to a problem that many don't have.

I'm glad you found my story cute, but fail to see how pointing out imperfections in credit card insurance policies is supporting bitcoin, because bitcoin doesn't fill those imperfections. In fact, even with imperfections, using credit cards are still better than getting my account hacked on a bitcoin exchange.

Bitcoin transactions are also not immediate as you say they are. The entire world's supply of bitcoin is limited to 2.7 transactions a second, meaning if 10 million people used bitcoin, they would only be able to do 1 transaction every 43 days [1].

I'm not even going to go into why you would compare Mt. Gox to Madoff. Madoff is an uninsured investor and in prison, Mt. Gox is an exchange and the thieves are where?

[1](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=941331.msg10360199#m...)

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#185

Post by etchalon »

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).

It mostly comes from people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards.

I wouldn't get anywhere near that site.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#186

Post by collision »

kchoudhu wrote: post #156
collision wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.

Inherent to Stripe processing BTC is the fact that you are now a foreign exchange broker. Here's a small sample of why you're going to have to do a lot better than "we only charge 0.5%" to convince me that adding FX risk into my payment processing stack is a good idea: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manip... http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-... And that's just from t…

Hm? As a business selling with Stripe, you won't be taking any FX risk. You request $20, and you receive $20 - 0.5%.

I am a huge fan of Matt Levine's work, but the articles you reference are about banks who participate in the FX markets, which is... different.

(Relevant disclosure: I work at Stripe.)

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#188

Post by bduerst »

celticninja wrote: post #181
bduerst wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, some of these hypotheticals are wishful thinking. For example 1, it's a double edged sword. As a seller, no international chargebacks sounds like a wet dream! As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver? Example 2 seems legit for now. If and when bitcoin becomes more mainstream, you'll see an increased transactional cost from overhead and risk mi…

>...and eventually gave me my money back. How many Mt. Gox users got their money back? these are not the same situation and I think it is disingenous to act like it is. A comparable situation is that when you had your card skimmed and locked up you had to go say 3 days without access to your funds until a new card turned up, and again lets be charitable and say your bank refunded you within 2 weeks. so you were incon…

Both involve theft, except one is insured. You don't insure money that you give to an investor (Madoff), which is why it's disingenuous to compare Mt. Gox to an investment scam.

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#189

Post by isthisforme »

krithix wrote: post #44
veesahni wrote: post #12

Is this available to canadian stripe accounts too or just US?

I work for Stripe. While people anywhere around the world can pay with Bitcoin (and we've seen payments from over 60 countries during our beta), we currently only support merchants who have U.S. bank accounts. (Fun fact: Our first Bitcoin user had a Canadian Stripe account, but also a U.S. bank account.)

Thanks for the clarification. Could a Canadian Stripe user just start using the API and then go open a us bank account after launch, or would the us bank account be needed prior to going live?

Re: Stripe: Bitcoin

#190

Post by isthisforme »

krithix wrote: post #44
veesahni wrote: post #12

Is this available to canadian stripe accounts too or just US?

I work for Stripe. While people anywhere around the world can pay with Bitcoin (and we've seen payments from over 60 countries during our beta), we currently only support merchants who have U.S. bank accounts. (Fun fact: Our first Bitcoin user had a Canadian Stripe account, but also a U.S. bank account.)

And can you clarify if by us bank account you mean 'us dollar denominated', or 'us dollar denominated and a us bank'. USD bank accounts are very common in Canada.

Not that needing a US bank account is necessarily a show-stopper, but it's more work.

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