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BitPay and PayPal

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: BitPay and PayPal

#51

Post by lnanek2 »

trevordev wrote: post #14

BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding…

Yeah, prize disbursements were handled terribly. My team won BitPay's prize at AngelHack SF, contacted them repeatedly, and were told to wait until all AngelHacks were over before anything would be done. Months and months later it arrived this week. We actually avoided BitPay intentionally at a couple hackathons after since no one was sure if they were just scammers or not.

That said, I had no problem with their API. They had an easy web checkout link that could be generated that worked fine in an Android WebView for my first implementation. Later at AngelHack SV I used their PHP API to generate invoices for specific prices for goods dynamically and was then still able to send people to their site to finish checkout and get redirected when it completed.

Didn't really see any missing documentation and their site worked fine, responding quite quickly when money was sent to the barcode it showed or the link that could start a wallet app on Android, and their PHP sample code worked trivially. Who knows, maybe they've improved the docs and samples since you used it, though. Or you were trying to hack bitcore, which is a completely different level of difficulty.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#52

Post by joshuaxls »

fragsworth wrote: post #48
joshuaxls wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one…

> That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes. That logic doesn't really follow. It takes over all those things even if its market cap is only $1 billion. Bitcoin's market cap not related to the industries it replaces. If it takes over rare metals, though, as an investment, it might end up worth something close to the market cap of Gold.

You're correct. I'm simply replying to his statement that there's no value proposition in bitcoin to consumers. My response is that it can easily replace a company worth $8.7B, thus showing it has consumer value, not that bitcoin will be worth $8.7B if it replaces Western Union.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#53

Post by aianus »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #35
awt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be more general. Set A = stuff you can buy with USD. Set B = stuff you can buy with BTC. Set W = all stuff. Set A will always be a subset of set W, and is getting to be a smaller subset every day. Set B will in the future be an exact match for Set W. Which unit of account would you choose? A or B? edited: typo (C instead of B)

A, until B has FDIC protections.

Why would FDIC insurance make me feel safer than elliptic curve cryptography?

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#54

Post by joshuaxls »

notahacker wrote: post #45
joshuaxls wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one…

Bitcoin doesn't render Western Union obsolete until the day remote Burkinabe villages can walk to their local store and pick up the US-resident cousin's salary earned in CFA Franc banknotes. A highly volatile intermediary currency is hardly an advantage there.

Yes, it has a long way to go, but it's off to a good start. I doubt a significant portion of Western Union transactions are to ultra-remote locations, but I could be wrong.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#55

Post by runeks »

jarek wrote: post #47
andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/

> BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: For values of "rocketing" approaching "down 6% on the week, 13% on the month"

and ~250% on the year [1] :)

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10z...

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#56

Post by IllIllIlllIl »

martindale wrote: post #46
[deleted] wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You might be thinking of BitID, which tightly couples payment addresses to identity: https://github.com/bitid/bitid – BitAuth does not use Bitcoin keypairs. We created BitAuth as a way to avoid coupling payments with identity, which is why the keypairs are independent and include a different prefix (0x02).

I'm sorry you're completely correct, I mistook them as being the same thing.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#57

Post by [deleted] »

joshuaxls wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you're susceptible to physical robbery unless you store your money in a bank with FDIC protection. This is one reason Satoshi chooses to remain anonymous.

We're in agreement. Since USD is a physical store of value, it suffers from problems like robbery. Hence the need for banks. With bitcoin, you don't need a bank. I have a 24-word passphrase in my head that can be converted to my private key—a "brainwallet". I know it, and my parents do. It's not written down or stored anywhere. It simply isn't physical. With those 24 words, you can unlock all of the value I have stor…

[deleted]

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#58

Post by sillysaurus3 »

joshuaxls wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you're susceptible to physical robbery unless you store your money in a bank with FDIC protection. This is one reason Satoshi chooses to remain anonymous.

We're in agreement. Since USD is a physical store of value, it suffers from problems like robbery. Hence the need for banks. With bitcoin, you don't need a bank. I have a 24-word passphrase in my head that can be converted to my private key—a "brainwallet". I know it, and my parents do. It's not written down or stored anywhere. It simply isn't physical. With those 24 words, you can unlock all of the value I have stor…

You're okay with someone being able to hold a gun to your head and demand your 24-word passphrase? That's why you need a bank with FDIC protection, even with Bitcoin.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#59

Post by aianus »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8
andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

> Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends?

- Buying things that people would be unwilling to sell to you with existing payment methods due to fraud risks. One legal example: iPhone purchases shipped to Nigeria.

- Buying things electronically where the existing payment methods are too slow or expensive. For example, funding a stock trading account in seconds to an hour instead of 1-2 days or funding an online gambling account (legal for most non-US residents but slow and expensive with credit cards).

- Buying an expensive item from a trusted merchant at a discount commensurate with the reduced transaction cost and zero chargeback risk.

- Paying for contractors or crowd-sourcing efforts in any country in the world with ease.

Use your imagination.

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