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Ending Bitcoin Support

989 points by uptown 9y ago

brndnmtthws 9y ago
Is this a precursor to pumping their own shitcoin Stellar Lumens? I see they casually dropped it in there after naming a couple others to appear unbiased. They claim to be interested in Lightning Network, but aren't interested in using it? That's a bit lame. Or a lot lame.
- horsecaptin 9y ago
  Why do you call it a shitcoin?
  - brndnmtthws 9y ago
    It has an uncapped supply, and inflates at 1% per year. It doesn't really seem to offer anything compelling other than its A-list investors. It was also created by the same person who brought the world eDonkey 2000, Mt. Gox, and Ripple.
    - nebulous1 9y ago
      Those are all very successful projects. All the bad stuff that happened at Mt Gox occurred after he sold it to Karpelès.
    - horsecaptin 9y ago
      Isn't it's main value prop fast transactions? It isn't really meant for storing value is it?
    - watoc 9y ago
      I don't have an opinion on Lumens but the fact that the supply is uncapped would make it much more suitable as a currency.
- geofft 9y ago
  > They claim to be interested in Lightning Network, but aren't interested in using it? I don't understand how you conclude this from the post. (Does Lightning even exist today? Could they use it today if they wanted to?)
  - brndnmtthws 9y ago
    Lighting Network does indeed exist today. You can use it right now. Download the desktop app and try it out: https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app It's early, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
    - geofft 9y ago
      The README says "The application is under active development and currently only operates on the Bitcoin testnet chain." - is that inaccurate? If that is still accurate, it continues to seem to me that Stripe is interested in actually using Lightning on the production Bitcoin blockchain, they just can't do that today.
      - notsrg 9y ago
        https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ 153 nodes currently on mainnet.
- andrewtbham 9y ago
  Absolutely. FTA > We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow.
glesperance 9y ago
Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Too bad they aren't replacing this with another cryptocurrency at the moment.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Is the lack of replacement option an example of the "they will ruin it for all of us" or maybe an overall decrease in confidence in cryptocurrency altogether?
  - glesperance 9y ago
    One could presume it's because they want to add XLM ; and want to appear unbiased for now.
- gizmo385 9y ago
  > Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Can someone bother explaining what this actually means? 3 weeks ago everyone is hype about how Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency and now that it's tanking and vendors are dropping it like a hot potato, its no longer a transactional currency and it's now a "store of value".
  - fastball 9y ago
    Bitcoin is currently the crypto equivalent of gold. It's not reasonable to use it to buy a coffee. However, Bitcoin is trying (but many would argue, failing) to upgrade the network with something that will allow cheaper/faster transactions and make it a reasonable currency again. However, (imo) in-fighting has seriously hampered this. That being the reality, many people hope that Bitcoin will remain a store of value into the future, even if most people are using some other crypto for actual day-to-day transactions. There are "old-school" cryptos with lower transaction fees (Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash). There is not much reason to use them as an actual currency except for the fact that they have more inertia than most other projects (and therefore more things have been built around them). In particular, most places that had some sort of Bitcoin integration can very easily switch to Bitcoin Cash for much lower tx fees. There are many cryptos that are trying to be currency in a permanently scalable way (IOTA, Ripple, Stellar) Other cryptos are trying to be cash, i.e. anonymous (Dash, Monero, ZCash). Most others are either A. intended to be more platform than currency (Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Tron) or B. too small to mention.
mankash666 9y ago
Ethereum transaction fees are still in cents. They should start supporting it as a form of payment.
- kevingadd 9y ago
  Wouldn't that just contribute to Ethereum transaction fees getting higher, so they eventually have to remove it? They'd need to move to a cryptocurrency with better scalability (something eth might have in the future, but certainly doesn't have now)
  - justAnotherNET 9y ago
    Casper + Plasma will solve that.
- RexetBlell 9y ago
  They should add support for the Ethereum stable currency DAI: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/ Most people don't want to use a currency for payments that is volatile.
- Zaheer 9y ago
  Side-questino: Does ETH as a coin benefit from all the coins that are built on top of Ethereum network?
  - peterkelly 9y ago
    In terms of demand - yes, since all transactions must be paid for in ETH.
- nebulous1 9y ago
  Actually it's pretty high too these days (not compared to Bitcoin of course) https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee...
stanchion 9y ago
This is good for Bitcoin
- rburhum 9y ago
  how is this good for Bitcoin?
  - curuinor 9y ago
    this is a meme from r/bitcoin, where literally everything gets replied to, "this is good for bitcoin" it is also an identical meme from r/buttcoin
    - rburhum 9y ago
      ah! thank you :)
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    It's a long-standing joke about how Bitcoin proponents tend to show up in comments about bad-news-for-Bitcoin threads to explain how this latest development is actually good for it.
    - rburhum 9y ago
      thks!
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Bitcoin is a whole new paradigm unconstrained by obsolete notions of bad news like the failing bankster financial system.
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  This is fine.
nvk 9y ago
They should have replaced it with Lightning Network, is amazingly fast and cheap and works on top of Bitcoin. I'm running a test node, this stuff really works! > Lightning is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants. In case you are curious https://lightning.network https://lightning.network and another good resource here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_network_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_n...
- cortesoft 9y ago
  They mention in the post that they are interested in lightning.
  - nvk 9y ago
    Yes, maybe wishful-thinking but could have waited until a alternative was in place or at least have linked to a test implementation or something.
    - cortesoft 9y ago
      I think they had to act now because every single transaction was timing out (taking longer than an hour), meaning the service was effectively not working. They couldn't wait.
- eropple 9y ago
  They could also replace it with money, which one can readily and easily, through systems with well-understood protocols that are agreed upon by participants in those systems, exchange for goods and services. (Even the Lightning Network people don't think you should use it with money. Not that that's likely to be a problem, what with it being for Bitcoin and all. Stripe also doesn't support any other commodities as method of payment, and frankly if they did I'd hope they'd choose cattle before Bitcoin because we know that cattle is actually worth something.)
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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montrose 9y ago
This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chocolatebunny 9y ago
  Bitcoin is definitely acting more like an asset than a medium of exchange, and yeah, I don't see why it would hold any value if it's treated like an asset. But as soon as people realize that then it should go back to being a medium of exchange and then it'll hold value again as an asset? Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Bitcoin is functioning exactly as designed. Satoshi planned for this; it's in the whitepaper. Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      Can you highlight the part of the white paper you're referring to? https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        "The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free." It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying. Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice? Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.
vec 9y ago
For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD <=> BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.
- artursapek 9y ago
  We've seen this increasingly happening as well, and it's kind of embarrassing because it's for a crypto-related website. After struggling with it for months I'm not surprised Stripe has thrown in the towel here.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Did their api allow you to set the transaction fee?
  - vec 9y ago
    Nope. We set a price in USD and get paid in USD, minus their usual fees. The price in BTC was determined by the current exchange rate, hence why they were only willing to honor the price for a short time.
- koheripbal 9y ago
  I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a store of value is better placed in an actively used coin network.
  - avenoir 9y ago
    With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?
Mithorium 9y ago
Stellar isn't a direct replacement per-se, it's fast and has near zero transaction fees, but the lumens themselves were not intended to be used as a medium of transaction, only to have a token amount to pay the miniscule fees with. To use the stellar network as intended, there needs to be an anchor that issues USD/EUR/whatever tokens on the stellar network, and then have stripe accept those tokens (issued by anchors they trust to convert the tokens back into real money) XRB would be another good candidate for low fees, but that one has no fiat pair to value against, so it's hard to pay a USD invoice with it when the value is indeterminate.
- doomslice 9y ago
  Even if XLM was not intended to be used for direct payments, is there anything that actually prevents it from being used for it? From everything I see, it actually seems like a pretty good candidate for actual spending.
  - Mithorium 9y ago
    Well, if people decide to use it that way nobody can stop them. In my opinion, that would be an inefficient way of using the network, since if you pay with XLM today you need to first buy some, taking a loss on the conversion since you have to go through either eth or btc, then the payee needs to sell it (again with another intermediate currency) to get the money to pay their operating costs, and they'll likely charge a processing fee for that, and at that point you may as well be using a credit card. On the other hand, if you use it like intended by getting USD stellar tokens from an anchor, and paying with those, the merchant can more or less accept them at face value (if they trust the anchor to give them USD for the token)
    - speeq 9y ago
      ELI5 on the difference between Stellar and Ripple? Why are companies like Stripe and Kik embracing XLM over XRP?
    - lalaland1125 9y ago
      If you trust the anchor, why not use them directly?
almost_usual 9y ago
Seems to be a well written argument for ending their support while still maintaining a positive cryptocurrency stance. This will still cause many people to be upset because the state of cryptocurrency right now is a hot topic and changing quickly. Why didn't they switch to X? What about Y? etc. All of it requires development work and many of these currencies are still growing up. Seems like a reasonable approach.
blueprint 9y ago
I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short-sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or they just didn't know and weren't told.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  "In testing phase" is probably not good enough for Stripe to roll out to their customers. I think what they meant was "we're just not seeing enough usage of Bitcoin payments to justify the costs of supporting it." Which is perfectly fair.
  - bitoneill 9y ago
    Or they have no faith in Lightning Network technology
  - blueprint 9y ago
    That's why I said "wait". Do you know how long it's been in testing? Do you know how close it is to readiness?
    - sincerely 9y ago
      Lightning has been close to readiness for what seems like an eternity. It's an exciting prospect to be sure (centralization worries aside) but I think it's important to keep our expectations reasonable. The long term future of cryptos is harmed by baseless hype.
      - blueprint 9y ago
        What the heck are you talking about? It's only recently come close to readiness. Bitcoin secures a huge amount of capital. The people who actually know what they're doing in this space aren't going to hurry a solution to market which has not been EXTREMELY rigorously tested. I understand that takes a long time but we're talking about people's livelihoods here. You're so confident it's not ready, but can you actually answer the question of by what criteria it would even be deemable as ready? It's literally already being tested. [1, 2] Maybe I should get some more downvotes first though. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ieuki/how_to_test_lightning_network_on_testnet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ieuki/how_to_test... 2. https://discover.coinsquare.io/digital-currency/lightning-network-first-transaction/ https://discover.coinsquare.io/digital-currency/lightning-ne...
pitaj 9y ago
BCH fees are in the $0.25 range right now. I wonder if they considered BCH. They could probably pretty easily implement it with their existing BTC infrastructure.
- bitoneill 9y ago
  He says in the article they are considering Bitcoin Cash as well as Litecoin
- lawn 9y ago
  That number is much too high. The average is much higher than for usual transactions because many wallets are overpaying and very large transactions with many outputs and inputs are driving it up. $0.01 transactions (or 1 sat/byte) transactions will confirm in the next block. This is lower than for Litecoin or Ethereum.
mcs_ 9y ago
Love the idea of Stellar. Looks like a smart move from Stripe but will be nice to see ethereum (when and if POS).
bactrian 9y ago
Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it. This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards. As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.
- gizmo385 9y ago
  > As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline. You say this as if a large-scale, mainstream switch to a decentralized currency is right around the corner. With how volatile the market has been, what makes you think a switch like this is even remotely near-term?
  - philwelch 9y ago
    It's so obvious, I'm just going to use a decentralized cryptocurrency to hail my self-driving electric car in like five years, so why bother supporting legacy technologies? /s
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  Bitcoin transactions take hours to confirm now, making Bitcoin useless as a transactional medium. When people are paying 25%, 50%, and more to send Bitcoin of typical levels of purchase, it's time to get out. Stripe is honestly a bit late in dropping Bitcoin for transactions.
  - solean 9y ago
    I sent ~$5k in btc last night for a $3 fee and it confirmed in around 30 minutes..
    - JohnTHaller 9y ago
      Then you got very lucky: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time
faragon 9y ago
In my opinion, Bitcoin trading is about trading bad money for good money. When the bubble burst, the good money will be in the pockets of former Bitcoin "market makers", while the loses will be in the side of the enthusiasts/idealists/naive.
j_s 9y ago
Props for hanging in there as long as they did! Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 (Dec 2017) Barely related, but in case you missed it earlier this month: Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496
colordrops 9y ago
I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  Don't worry - scaling solutions won't matter when Tether bubble pops and takes crypto market down for two years. BTC and BCH both are going to suffer equally.
- peterkelly 9y ago
  All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.
  - lawn 9y ago
    Yet nobody quantifies what long term is. Forgoing a solution that works temporarily, even if only for a year or two, isn't very bright if the alternative is this. Bitcoin is quickly loosing the network effect, the only thing it has going for it vs other altcoins.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      120 years.
  - doctorfoo 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies can be scaled to VISA levels on chain with today's hardware. And probably much further with future hardware advances. Is that "enough"? The only argument that is ever presented is that huge blocks harm "decentralisation" - not that it cannot be done.
thrillgore 9y ago
I can't blame them for doing this. I think the writing is on the wall about how people really use Bitcoin, and with the glut of ICOs (and many turning into pump-and-dump scams) reality is catching up with potential. I still have hopes for Ether.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
_pdp_ 9y ago
We have integrated Coinbase recently. Transactions take over a day to get verified. This is fine because the product is an annual subscription. That being said, except as an alternative to an international transfer, BTC has not much e-commerce value from our end.
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  Are you converting straight to USD (or your local currency), or keeping the BTC? I know most storefronts that accept crypto do the former, but I can't help but wonder how much more they could have made if they had done the latter.
  - cheez 9y ago
    Easy to say after the fact.
    - Cyberdog 9y ago
      Yes, fair enough - hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.
dnprock 9y ago
Bitcoin isn't like gold. You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. No need for trust means no trust. We know what "gold standard" means. You can guess what "bitcoin standard" would mean. Those who think bitcoin is an asset storage are delusional.
- cwkoss 9y ago
  > You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. What makes you think that? Trade dirty money for bullion, then trade bullion for cash at a pawn shop - money laundered. Buy gold, after it appreciates trade it for a good without reporting the capital gain - evaded taxes. Or simply accept physical gold in return for labor without reporting or paying taxes.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- zbentley 9y ago
  > You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. You can't? Seems to me it's reasonably handy for that purpose. There are some better alternatives, but gold's not terrible.
aaroninsf 9y ago
The difference between gold and cryptocurrencies is that gold is something that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. Simulated gold is not actual gold, in other words. They are under current conventions interchangeable, but the context that allows that is contingent.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  actually if people started not viewing gold as a store of value but just as a raw material like aluminum it’s price would tank.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    The price of gold could significantly decrease, that's for sure, but even purely as a material it still would be reasonably valuable, significantly more valuable than silver. It has a price floor; bitcoin does not.
- yashap 9y ago
  Yeah, that’s pretty much my feeling too. Maybe one day crypto currencies will be useful for making purchases, but they certainly aren’t today, and I think it’s decenty likely they’re never used much in that capacity. If you just want to hold an asset, are they really worthwhile over physical assets? There are arguments both ways, but my gut feeling is no. I think the vast, vast majority of the reason for their rise in price is a combination of “the price is going up, I gotta get in now!”, and manipulation by large, unscrupulous investors. Basically, a tulip mania/pyramid scheme type phenomenon. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I don’t see any really value/utility, and expect an absolutely massive collapse. I think there’s just enough “maybe it’ll be the new gold! Maybe it’ll be the new USD!” to fuel the hype, but mostly I think it’s only going up because it’s going up, which is really the strongest indicator of truly terrible bubble.
- cwkoss 9y ago
  Isn't the same true for fiat currencies or stocks?
undoware 9y ago
A lot of the chatter in this post is about the underlying value of Bitcoin (and blockchain currency generally) as an asset class. I keep telling folks: yes, it absolutely does have value apart from sentiment; holding a blockchain currency gives you access to all the infrastructure built on that product -- regardless of whether that infrastructure is for exchange, or storage, or smart contracts, or whatever. It follows that the worth of a specific blockchain currency is tied to the usefulness and -- to be brutally honest -- the coolness of the underlying technology. This is why you should short BTC (and even ETH). Both are proof-of-work, both consume massive amounts of power, and both are increasingly useless for transacting. Eventually, the slow deprecation of Bitcoin as a means of transaction will make the underlying infrastructure (appear) worthless, and at that inflection point, it becomes worthless as an asset class as well, as it will no longer be a stable store of value. So take all your winnings from the Bitcoin lottery and plough them into something that actually has legs. When my 'sell' threshold hits (I currently hold ETH), I'm buying the shit out of, e.g., Cardano, and Stellar Lumens. And if the blockade by the old guard ever cracks, TenX -- connected to a payment card -- will be sex on legs. (Ok currencies can have neither sex nor legs but you get my drift.) I am explicitly buying as an investment in the technology. Believe in functional coding and smart contracts? You could do a hell of a lot worse. Mutatis mutandis, Stellar Lumens; different virtues, but also impressive. I can see both technologies going forward, and I believe in both of them. Can't say the same for Bitcoin anymore. Finally, talking about infrastructure, also evaluate who the infrastructure is for, and how good it is at serving them. It probably makes sense to hold some Monero right now, as, like it or not, the traditional guarantor of value for Bitcoin is its utility in doing shady stuff. Privacycoins meet the needs of Bitcoin's original audience better than Bitcoin ever did.
- Chirael 9y ago
  Yes, some of the "dark web" marketplaces are starting to accept Monero now in addition to Bitcoin, for the reason you mentioned. I looked into buying Stellar but it was surprisingly difficult to buy, and the Stellar Desktop client was just confusing. I love Stellar conceptually but am not sure it's a good "investment" (if it was hard for me to buy/use I'm thinking it will be hard for others, too).
beaker52 9y ago
It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO. Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions. The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting Web payments with it. I am holding some, so maybe I've drunk the kool aid but I really feel like it's something worth keeping an eye on or looking into if you're interested in the practical crypto-payments space. There's an active reddit you can find with Google if you're genuinely interested in more info.
- ezekg 9y ago
  No, Rai does not have a functioning network as it currently stands. Nodes consistently become out of sync with the rest of the network, which has caused a lot of drama because the exchanges that list Rai had to shut down deposit/withdrawals for weeks. It's only recently that most of those exchanges were able to enable deposit/withdrawals by implementing a workaround provided by the Rai team. But it's far from stable and there is not yet a permanent solution to the Node issues. Even their wallet has consistent sync issues, resulting in the Node getting stuck to the point of having to download a snapshot of the network to be able to get caught up. But, with all that said, I have yet to find a cryptocurrency that left me more impressed than Rai has. My first transaction took 2 seconds to appear in my wallet.
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  It looks really promising. Unfortunately, it can only be bought on two relatively unknown exchanges.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    They won the Binance community vote so it will be there soon.
- misiti3780 9y ago
  how did you go about buying it ?
desireco42 9y ago
Stellar which they mention as alternative would probably suit them way better. It doesn't have any of the issues that were problem with Bitcoin, but it's adoption is significantly less. Litecoin support would be very nice to have, it is kind of obvious step for transaction processing.
- lavezzi 9y ago
  Would prefer them to be looking into other coins such as Raiblocks.
  - desireco42 9y ago
    Yeah Raiblocks is pretty interesting too. I really like what developer had done.
swanson 9y ago
Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar.
vit05 9y ago
This is great news and opportunity for OmiseGO, Ethereum and Stellar. Solid projects with respectful and well know developers team that do not directly compete against Bitcoin.
bdcravens 9y ago
We've used the Bitcoin integration since it was in beta (I even got a Stripe t-shirt for pointing out a small bug) but I don't think we've ever received a single Bitcoin payment. The workflow is too jarring (copy and paste a Bitcoin address to make a payment elsewhere, then come back). Additionally, refunds are tricky: everything's immediately converted to fiat, so the customer needs to know they won't (or are extremely unlikely to) get the same amount of Bitcoin back. Obviously these issues are true independent of current fee and transaction time story.
sincerely 9y ago
Another day, another HN title changed without any clear rationale. Was the original "Stripe ends Bitcoin support" really so bad that it had to be changed to "Ending Bitcoin Support"?
- mankyd 9y ago
  They have a policy of _always_ changing it to match the title of the linked article. Most of the time this is either an improvement or (as in this case) neutral. I do wish they'd allow a little more editorializing, quite frankly. The linked title is not _always_ an improvement.
  - sincerely 9y ago
    Ah! That's interesting, I didn't realize it was an official policy. Given that, wouldn't it make sense to generate the post titles from the <title> element of the link automatically?
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      Title changes are still allowed when the title is too long, misleading, or provides no information about the contents.
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    Agreed; this would be far more useful having "Stripe" in the title as I had to click through to see who was ending to and couldn't just grok it.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Not _always_; titles change when they're linkbait. Here, though, Stripe is already in the story title, and the "Stripe ends" preface suggests that it's a story being written about Stripe, rather than Stripe writing for themselves.
marenkay 9y ago
Is it just me or did they just cancel BTC support as it fails to provide what BTC was touted to give to the people? In turn doesn't this imply mined coins as they are pretty much are useless for anyone except those having monetary assets in the first place?
gthtjtkt 9y ago
This is the main reason Litecoin exists. Strange that they decided not to use it...
- detaro 9y ago
  Not popular enough yet if I understand the article right.
- lawn 9y ago
  Litecoin failed to gain the network effect which is so crucial for a currency. It never had a roadmap other than copying what Bitcoin did. It's not even a cheap coin to use compared to the alternatives. There's no reason to use Litecoin over Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum or Monero at this point.
  - gthtjtkt 9y ago
    Litecoin volume has regularly been $1 billion+ per day during the past several months, and Ethereum has been suffering from the same issues as Bitcoin. LTC's median transaction fee is literally pennies, you don't think that's cheap? The fact that you think ETH is more suitable for use as a currency only shows how little you know about crypto. ETH isn't even meant to be a currency.
ivanstame 9y ago
This is the snowflake that starts everything :)
CryoLogic 9y ago
IOTA can actually handle great TPS unlike bitcoin. BTC is maybe 10TPS cap while IOTA is pushing towards 2k TPS which is what Visa can do.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  The Visa argument has always been silly. Visa has an average transaction rate of 2000/s, and can support ~50,000/s. They support 25x the overhead of their actual rate. If Visa needed to support 1,000,000 tps, they would do it. That tech is much easier to develop centrally than in a blockchain-distributed network. They just don't have any reason to do it because they match the scale they care about already.
- lawn 9y ago
  Damn lot's of people are pushing their favorite coin. Here are some reasons IOTA is a shitcoin and cannot ever replace Bitcoin: 1. No decentralized solution to the double spend problem. The very reason Bitcoin exists IOTA fails at. 2. Dev team is so incompetent they tried to implement their own cryptographic hash function and predictably failed. 3. Mass buzzwords: Quantum proof, ternary(!), Internet of Things, instant transactions, no fees! Everything is perfect! 4. They have no solution to spam. POW is the only cost to transactions but it's extremely low so dedicated computers can outspend everyone else. With the way the tangle works this in practice mean transactions won't be confirmed. 5. Their network doesn't even work properly with users trying or hours to get their transaction accepted by the network. There are more but I can't be bothered.
stevewilhelm 9y ago
> Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. I would say it has evolved to become an instrument for speculation or a hedge against a local currency's volatility.
nadam 9y ago
If cryptocurrencies really succeed, we will not need a centralized service like Stripe. Hopefully we will use a 'decentralized Stripe' (as far as I know the Dash Evolution platform will be sometinhg like that. Maybe that is the reason that they did not even mention Dash in the article, despite it being one of the most promising digital Cash system on the market.)
- Casseres 9y ago
  I'd rather not use a coin that requires the use of masternodes - let everyone's vote be equal and not make it a requirement to be rich in order to vote. Also there's no way to prove that a few people don't own a majority of the masternodes. With the huge instamine and the creator's refusual to restart the coin, it's just too sketchy for me to ever trust.
fpgaminer 9y ago
It is amazing the number of shallow comments shouting doom and gloom over news like this and others (Steam, etc). Must be the end of Bitcoin because transaction fees are too high! And more generally everyone shouting doom and gloom over high transaction fees. Let's stop and think about this critically for once. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are high. And that's somehow a bad thing? By that same logic it's bad that Apple can charge so much for their phones. $800 phones are so ridiculous. No one can buy the phones! And Apple is clearly a failing business because of it. It's bad that Tesla is able to charge $70k+ for the Model S. Tesla is a failing business with no future prospects. The experiment is over. Time to buy Chevy Volts instead. Everyone sell TSLA because the Model S is too expensive! The interpretation that high Bitcoin transaction fees is somehow bad and signals the end of Bitcoin is just so ludicrous when subjected to even an ounce of critical thinking. Bitcoin transaction fees are high because Bitcoin transactions are _valuable_. Because people are willing to pay that much to make a transaction on a network that secures their transaction in an immutable, public record stored redundantly on 10,000+ machines. We should see this as a massive signal that Bitcoin is _successful_. That demand for its technology grew beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The fact that Stripe and other payment platforms can no longer use the technology is disappointing, but for different reasons. So to re-iterate my point one last time, Bitcoin has succeeded in the same way that Tesla succeeded. It made a Model S blockchain, and people are clamoring over one another to get access to it. Of course, I would be remiss to ignore one valid complaint about high fees. Bitcoin's goal was to free the masses from the entrenched banking system. Part of the banking system is making small, every day transactions. In that regard, Bitcoin has yet to succeed. Going back to my analogy, we can see that Tesla hasn't succeeded in a similar regard either; we don't see electric cars in the hands of the average person. But that's not because the technology has failed. That's because we haven't gotten there yet. It's a long road yet. We'll get there. The world doesn't change in 9 years. The banking system won't be overturned in a decade. But we have a beachhead. Bitcoin is just getting started.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thebiglebrewski 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but saying Bitcoin succeeded like the Model S succeeded is an argument that just holds no water to me at all. That makes no sense.
thickblockchain 9y ago
Yeah, but who really cares? 95% of people buy, sell and transfer Bitcoin to do one thing: speculating on Crypto-Assets. It really doesn't matter if the fees are so high, it's not like people buy crypto like candy, they buy it like stocks. Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? That's still cheap compared to other methods of international money transfer. People are obviously ready to spend that much. Bitcoin has always been terrible as an everyday currency, even when transactions were practically free and fast, who wanted to wait 10 minutes to confirm their purchase of a Grand Latte? Just pay with any of the existing methods, they work just fine, it's a solved problem. There's probably 1000 cryptocurrencies that could work for that just fine, but nobody really needs that in the first place. You gotta realize that Bitcoin is gonna be worth A MILLION dollars or maybe just one dollar, but then it could go back up to a thousand again! That is the real value of Bitcoin.
- kbhn 9y ago
  > Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? Because Bitcoin wasn't originally designed for speculating on cryptocurrencies.
smnplk 9y ago
Stripe,please just add support for RaiBlocks.
m3kw9 9y ago
What did you expect? They are in the business of making transactions, bitcoin isn’t anymore.
skywhopper 9y ago
I'd just like to gripe a bit about the use of "fiat currency" as an antonym of "cryptocurrency". Bitcoin may not be similar in all respects to typical government-issued money, but it is far more similar to fiat currency than to hard currency: its supply is artificially controlled, and Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. Bitcoin is administered by a de facto government in the form of the miners that run the network. That this government does not have a direct correlation to a UN-recognized nation-state does not make Bitcoin any less artificial or more real.
- stephen_g 9y ago
  Bitcoin isn't like real money though. Take the US dollar - whatever happens, something like 300 million people and tens of millions of companies will still need to pay taxes in that currency. That's a big baseline demand, before you even consider the goods and services available in the economy that can be bought with US dollars. Whereas everybody trading bitcoin or accepting it as a payment method could switch to a different cryptocurrency tomorrow...
Sonnol53 9y ago
Beautifully written! I will take note.
featherverse 9y ago
SELL NOW.
alexnewman 9y ago
A little late to the party stripe. Bitcoin has been slow forever. Why now? It is just about to launch lightning or whatever.
mansilladev 9y ago
If they'd only listened when I suggested they go with Dogecoin. Dogeconomics axiom: 1Ð = 1Ð such finance. many simple. wow.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kristianp 9y ago
Weird, they seemed to time it just as the Bitcoin Lightning Network is starting to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-first-ever-physical-purchase-on-lightning-network https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-...
sytelus 9y ago
TLDR; Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.
5iveMinutes 9y ago
Bitcoin is good. . . But vape is better! https://youtu.be/HG-VClgOUCY https://youtu.be/HG-VClgOUCY Check out my brand new video of vape tricks! Like, Comment and Subscribe! 5ive Minutes Of Fame
consultSKI 9y ago
this is a good read for the reasons cited. it made no sense (or cents) for stripe or anyone else to put bitcoin on top of networks with traditional fees. i love stripe and hope they continue to allow me operate various businesses without the need for a traditional bank or processor. can't wait for them to do an IPO and pay off the VCs so i use them for my firearms clients.
confounded 9y ago
I hope that Stripe consider support for GNU Taler! https://gnutaler.org/ https://gnutaler.org/
- paulrd 9y ago
  That website is a fake website. The real one is taler.net. See the discussion in the email list: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.htm...
  - confounded 9y ago
    Wow, that’s pretty serious, thank you for pointing it out!

989 points by uptown 9y ago

Is this a precursor to pumping their own shitcoin Stellar Lumens? I see they casually dropped it in there after naming a couple others to appear unbiased. They claim to be interested in Lightning Network, but aren't interested in using it? That's a bit lame. Or a lot lame.

horsecaptin 9y ago
Why do you call it a shitcoin?
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  It has an uncapped supply, and inflates at 1% per year. It doesn't really seem to offer anything compelling other than its A-list investors. It was also created by the same person who brought the world eDonkey 2000, Mt. Gox, and Ripple.
  - nebulous1 9y ago
    Those are all very successful projects. All the bad stuff that happened at Mt Gox occurred after he sold it to Karpelès.
  - horsecaptin 9y ago
    Isn't it's main value prop fast transactions? It isn't really meant for storing value is it?
  - watoc 9y ago
    I don't have an opinion on Lumens but the fact that the supply is uncapped would make it much more suitable as a currency.
geofft 9y ago
> They claim to be interested in Lightning Network, but aren't interested in using it? I don't understand how you conclude this from the post. (Does Lightning even exist today? Could they use it today if they wanted to?)
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  Lighting Network does indeed exist today. You can use it right now. Download the desktop app and try it out: https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app It's early, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  - geofft 9y ago
    The README says "The application is under active development and currently only operates on the Bitcoin testnet chain." - is that inaccurate? If that is still accurate, it continues to seem to me that Stripe is interested in actually using Lightning on the production Bitcoin blockchain, they just can't do that today.
    - notsrg 9y ago
      https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ 153 nodes currently on mainnet.
andrewtbham 9y ago
Absolutely. FTA > We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow.

glesperance 9y ago

Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Too bad they aren't replacing this with another cryptocurrency at the moment.

Waterluvian 9y ago
Is the lack of replacement option an example of the "they will ruin it for all of us" or maybe an overall decrease in confidence in cryptocurrency altogether?
- glesperance 9y ago
  One could presume it's because they want to add XLM ; and want to appear unbiased for now.
gizmo385 9y ago
> Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Can someone bother explaining what this actually means? 3 weeks ago everyone is hype about how Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency and now that it's tanking and vendors are dropping it like a hot potato, its no longer a transactional currency and it's now a "store of value".
- fastball 9y ago
  Bitcoin is currently the crypto equivalent of gold. It's not reasonable to use it to buy a coffee. However, Bitcoin is trying (but many would argue, failing) to upgrade the network with something that will allow cheaper/faster transactions and make it a reasonable currency again. However, (imo) in-fighting has seriously hampered this. That being the reality, many people hope that Bitcoin will remain a store of value into the future, even if most people are using some other crypto for actual day-to-day transactions. There are "old-school" cryptos with lower transaction fees (Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash). There is not much reason to use them as an actual currency except for the fact that they have more inertia than most other projects (and therefore more things have been built around them). In particular, most places that had some sort of Bitcoin integration can very easily switch to Bitcoin Cash for much lower tx fees. There are many cryptos that are trying to be currency in a permanently scalable way (IOTA, Ripple, Stellar) Other cryptos are trying to be cash, i.e. anonymous (Dash, Monero, ZCash). Most others are either A. intended to be more platform than currency (Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Tron) or B. too small to mention.

mankash666 9y ago

Ethereum transaction fees are still in cents. They should start supporting it as a form of payment.

kevingadd 9y ago
Wouldn't that just contribute to Ethereum transaction fees getting higher, so they eventually have to remove it? They'd need to move to a cryptocurrency with better scalability (something eth might have in the future, but certainly doesn't have now)
- justAnotherNET 9y ago
  Casper + Plasma will solve that.
RexetBlell 9y ago
They should add support for the Ethereum stable currency DAI: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/ Most people don't want to use a currency for payments that is volatile.
Zaheer 9y ago
Side-questino: Does ETH as a coin benefit from all the coins that are built on top of Ethereum network?
- peterkelly 9y ago
  In terms of demand - yes, since all transactions must be paid for in ETH.
nebulous1 9y ago
Actually it's pretty high too these days (not compared to Bitcoin of course) https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee...

stanchion 9y ago

This is good for Bitcoin

rburhum 9y ago
how is this good for Bitcoin?
- curuinor 9y ago
  this is a meme from r/bitcoin, where literally everything gets replied to, "this is good for bitcoin" it is also an identical meme from r/buttcoin
  - rburhum 9y ago
    ah! thank you :)
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  It's a long-standing joke about how Bitcoin proponents tend to show up in comments about bad-news-for-Bitcoin threads to explain how this latest development is actually good for it.
  - rburhum 9y ago
    thks!
- tedunangst 9y ago
  Bitcoin is a whole new paradigm unconstrained by obsolete notions of bad news like the failing bankster financial system.
georgeecollins 9y ago
This is fine.

nvk 9y ago

They should have replaced it with Lightning Network, is amazingly fast and cheap and works on top of Bitcoin. I'm running a test node, this stuff really works! > Lightning is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants. In case you are curious https://lightning.network https://lightning.network and another good resource here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_network_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_n...

cortesoft 9y ago
They mention in the post that they are interested in lightning.
- nvk 9y ago
  Yes, maybe wishful-thinking but could have waited until a alternative was in place or at least have linked to a test implementation or something.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    I think they had to act now because every single transaction was timing out (taking longer than an hour), meaning the service was effectively not working. They couldn't wait.
eropple 9y ago
They could also replace it with money, which one can readily and easily, through systems with well-understood protocols that are agreed upon by participants in those systems, exchange for goods and services. (Even the Lightning Network people don't think you should use it with money. Not that that's likely to be a problem, what with it being for Bitcoin and all. Stripe also doesn't support any other commodities as method of payment, and frankly if they did I'd hope they'd choose cattle before Bitcoin because we know that cattle is actually worth something.)
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

montrose 9y ago

This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chocolatebunny 9y ago
Bitcoin is definitely acting more like an asset than a medium of exchange, and yeah, I don't see why it would hold any value if it's treated like an asset. But as soon as people realize that then it should go back to being a medium of exchange and then it'll hold value again as an asset? Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Bitcoin is functioning exactly as designed. Satoshi planned for this; it's in the whitepaper. Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Can you highlight the part of the white paper you're referring to? https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      "The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free." It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying. Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice? Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.

vec 9y ago

For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD <=> BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

artursapek 9y ago
We've seen this increasingly happening as well, and it's kind of embarrassing because it's for a crypto-related website. After struggling with it for months I'm not surprised Stripe has thrown in the towel here.
maxerickson 9y ago
Did their api allow you to set the transaction fee?
- vec 9y ago
  Nope. We set a price in USD and get paid in USD, minus their usual fees. The price in BTC was determined by the current exchange rate, hence why they were only willing to honor the price for a short time.
koheripbal 9y ago
I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a store of value is better placed in an actively used coin network.
- avenoir 9y ago
  With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?

Mithorium 9y ago

Stellar isn't a direct replacement per-se, it's fast and has near zero transaction fees, but the lumens themselves were not intended to be used as a medium of transaction, only to have a token amount to pay the miniscule fees with. To use the stellar network as intended, there needs to be an anchor that issues USD/EUR/whatever tokens on the stellar network, and then have stripe accept those tokens (issued by anchors they trust to convert the tokens back into real money) XRB would be another good candidate for low fees, but that one has no fiat pair to value against, so it's hard to pay a USD invoice with it when the value is indeterminate.

doomslice 9y ago
Even if XLM was not intended to be used for direct payments, is there anything that actually prevents it from being used for it? From everything I see, it actually seems like a pretty good candidate for actual spending.
- Mithorium 9y ago
  Well, if people decide to use it that way nobody can stop them. In my opinion, that would be an inefficient way of using the network, since if you pay with XLM today you need to first buy some, taking a loss on the conversion since you have to go through either eth or btc, then the payee needs to sell it (again with another intermediate currency) to get the money to pay their operating costs, and they'll likely charge a processing fee for that, and at that point you may as well be using a credit card. On the other hand, if you use it like intended by getting USD stellar tokens from an anchor, and paying with those, the merchant can more or less accept them at face value (if they trust the anchor to give them USD for the token)
  - speeq 9y ago
    ELI5 on the difference between Stellar and Ripple? Why are companies like Stripe and Kik embracing XLM over XRP?
  - lalaland1125 9y ago
    If you trust the anchor, why not use them directly?

almost_usual 9y ago

Seems to be a well written argument for ending their support while still maintaining a positive cryptocurrency stance. This will still cause many people to be upset because the state of cryptocurrency right now is a hot topic and changing quickly. Why didn't they switch to X? What about Y? etc. All of it requires development work and many of these currencies are still growing up. Seems like a reasonable approach.

blueprint 9y ago

I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short-sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or they just didn't know and weren't told.

munchbunny 9y ago
"In testing phase" is probably not good enough for Stripe to roll out to their customers. I think what they meant was "we're just not seeing enough usage of Bitcoin payments to justify the costs of supporting it." Which is perfectly fair.
- bitoneill 9y ago
  Or they have no faith in Lightning Network technology
- blueprint 9y ago
  That's why I said "wait". Do you know how long it's been in testing? Do you know how close it is to readiness?
  - sincerely 9y ago
    Lightning has been close to readiness for what seems like an eternity. It's an exciting prospect to be sure (centralization worries aside) but I think it's important to keep our expectations reasonable. The long term future of cryptos is harmed by baseless hype.
    - blueprint 9y ago
      What the heck are you talking about? It's only recently come close to readiness. Bitcoin secures a huge amount of capital. The people who actually know what they're doing in this space aren't going to hurry a solution to market which has not been EXTREMELY rigorously tested. I understand that takes a long time but we're talking about people's livelihoods here. You're so confident it's not ready, but can you actually answer the question of by what criteria it would even be deemable as ready? It's literally already being tested. [1, 2] Maybe I should get some more downvotes first though. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ieuki/how_to_test_lightning_network_on_testnet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ieuki/how_to_test... 2. https://discover.coinsquare.io/digital-currency/lightning-network-first-transaction/ https://discover.coinsquare.io/digital-currency/lightning-ne...

pitaj 9y ago

BCH fees are in the $0.25 range right now. I wonder if they considered BCH. They could probably pretty easily implement it with their existing BTC infrastructure.

bitoneill 9y ago
He says in the article they are considering Bitcoin Cash as well as Litecoin
lawn 9y ago
That number is much too high. The average is much higher than for usual transactions because many wallets are overpaying and very large transactions with many outputs and inputs are driving it up. $0.01 transactions (or 1 sat/byte) transactions will confirm in the next block. This is lower than for Litecoin or Ethereum.

mcs_ 9y ago

Love the idea of Stellar. Looks like a smart move from Stripe but will be nice to see ethereum (when and if POS).

bactrian 9y ago

Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it. This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards. As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.

gizmo385 9y ago
> As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline. You say this as if a large-scale, mainstream switch to a decentralized currency is right around the corner. With how volatile the market has been, what makes you think a switch like this is even remotely near-term?
- philwelch 9y ago
  It's so obvious, I'm just going to use a decentralized cryptocurrency to hail my self-driving electric car in like five years, so why bother supporting legacy technologies? /s
JohnTHaller 9y ago
Bitcoin transactions take hours to confirm now, making Bitcoin useless as a transactional medium. When people are paying 25%, 50%, and more to send Bitcoin of typical levels of purchase, it's time to get out. Stripe is honestly a bit late in dropping Bitcoin for transactions.
- solean 9y ago
  I sent ~$5k in btc last night for a $3 fee and it confirmed in around 30 minutes..
  - JohnTHaller 9y ago
    Then you got very lucky: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

faragon 9y ago

In my opinion, Bitcoin trading is about trading bad money for good money. When the bubble burst, the good money will be in the pockets of former Bitcoin "market makers", while the loses will be in the side of the enthusiasts/idealists/naive.

j_s 9y ago

Props for hanging in there as long as they did! Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 (Dec 2017) Barely related, but in case you missed it earlier this month: Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496

colordrops 9y ago

I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.

ActsJuvenile 9y ago
Don't worry - scaling solutions won't matter when Tether bubble pops and takes crypto market down for two years. BTC and BCH both are going to suffer equally.
peterkelly 9y ago
All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.
- lawn 9y ago
  Yet nobody quantifies what long term is. Forgoing a solution that works temporarily, even if only for a year or two, isn't very bright if the alternative is this. Bitcoin is quickly loosing the network effect, the only thing it has going for it vs other altcoins.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    120 years.
- doctorfoo 9y ago
  Cryptocurrencies can be scaled to VISA levels on chain with today's hardware. And probably much further with future hardware advances. Is that "enough"? The only argument that is ever presented is that huge blocks harm "decentralisation" - not that it cannot be done.

thrillgore 9y ago

I can't blame them for doing this. I think the writing is on the wall about how people really use Bitcoin, and with the glut of ICOs (and many turning into pump-and-dump scams) reality is catching up with potential. I still have hopes for Ether.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

_pdp_ 9y ago

We have integrated Coinbase recently. Transactions take over a day to get verified. This is fine because the product is an annual subscription. That being said, except as an alternative to an international transfer, BTC has not much e-commerce value from our end.

Cyberdog 9y ago
Are you converting straight to USD (or your local currency), or keeping the BTC? I know most storefronts that accept crypto do the former, but I can't help but wonder how much more they could have made if they had done the latter.
- cheez 9y ago
  Easy to say after the fact.
  - Cyberdog 9y ago
    Yes, fair enough - hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

dnprock 9y ago

Bitcoin isn't like gold. You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. No need for trust means no trust. We know what "gold standard" means. You can guess what "bitcoin standard" would mean. Those who think bitcoin is an asset storage are delusional.

cwkoss 9y ago
> You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. What makes you think that? Trade dirty money for bullion, then trade bullion for cash at a pawn shop - money laundered. Buy gold, after it appreciates trade it for a good without reporting the capital gain - evaded taxes. Or simply accept physical gold in return for labor without reporting or paying taxes.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
zbentley 9y ago
> You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. You can't? Seems to me it's reasonably handy for that purpose. There are some better alternatives, but gold's not terrible.

aaroninsf 9y ago

The difference between gold and cryptocurrencies is that gold is something that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. Simulated gold is not actual gold, in other words. They are under current conventions interchangeable, but the context that allows that is contingent.

oculusthrift 9y ago
actually if people started not viewing gold as a store of value but just as a raw material like aluminum it’s price would tank.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  The price of gold could significantly decrease, that's for sure, but even purely as a material it still would be reasonably valuable, significantly more valuable than silver. It has a price floor; bitcoin does not.
yashap 9y ago
Yeah, that’s pretty much my feeling too. Maybe one day crypto currencies will be useful for making purchases, but they certainly aren’t today, and I think it’s decenty likely they’re never used much in that capacity. If you just want to hold an asset, are they really worthwhile over physical assets? There are arguments both ways, but my gut feeling is no. I think the vast, vast majority of the reason for their rise in price is a combination of “the price is going up, I gotta get in now!”, and manipulation by large, unscrupulous investors. Basically, a tulip mania/pyramid scheme type phenomenon. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I don’t see any really value/utility, and expect an absolutely massive collapse. I think there’s just enough “maybe it’ll be the new gold! Maybe it’ll be the new USD!” to fuel the hype, but mostly I think it’s only going up because it’s going up, which is really the strongest indicator of truly terrible bubble.
cwkoss 9y ago
Isn't the same true for fiat currencies or stocks?

undoware 9y ago

A lot of the chatter in this post is about the underlying value of Bitcoin (and blockchain currency generally) as an asset class. I keep telling folks: yes, it absolutely does have value apart from sentiment; holding a blockchain currency gives you access to all the infrastructure built on that product -- regardless of whether that infrastructure is for exchange, or storage, or smart contracts, or whatever. It follows that the worth of a specific blockchain currency is tied to the usefulness and -- to be brutally honest -- the coolness of the underlying technology. This is why you should short BTC (and even ETH). Both are proof-of-work, both consume massive amounts of power, and both are increasingly useless for transacting. Eventually, the slow deprecation of Bitcoin as a means of transaction will make the underlying infrastructure (appear) worthless, and at that inflection point, it becomes worthless as an asset class as well, as it will no longer be a stable store of value. So take all your winnings from the Bitcoin lottery and plough them into something that actually has legs. When my 'sell' threshold hits (I currently hold ETH), I'm buying the shit out of, e.g., Cardano, and Stellar Lumens. And if the blockade by the old guard ever cracks, TenX -- connected to a payment card -- will be sex on legs. (Ok currencies can have neither sex nor legs but you get my drift.) I am explicitly buying as an investment in the technology. Believe in functional coding and smart contracts? You could do a hell of a lot worse. Mutatis mutandis, Stellar Lumens; different virtues, but also impressive. I can see both technologies going forward, and I believe in both of them. Can't say the same for Bitcoin anymore. Finally, talking about infrastructure, also evaluate who the infrastructure is for, and how good it is at serving them. It probably makes sense to hold some Monero right now, as, like it or not, the traditional guarantor of value for Bitcoin is its utility in doing shady stuff. Privacycoins meet the needs of Bitcoin's original audience better than Bitcoin ever did.

Chirael 9y ago
Yes, some of the "dark web" marketplaces are starting to accept Monero now in addition to Bitcoin, for the reason you mentioned. I looked into buying Stellar but it was surprisingly difficult to buy, and the Stellar Desktop client was just confusing. I love Stellar conceptually but am not sure it's a good "investment" (if it was hard for me to buy/use I'm thinking it will be hard for others, too).

beaker52 9y ago

It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO. Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions. The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting Web payments with it. I am holding some, so maybe I've drunk the kool aid but I really feel like it's something worth keeping an eye on or looking into if you're interested in the practical crypto-payments space. There's an active reddit you can find with Google if you're genuinely interested in more info.

ezekg 9y ago
No, Rai does not have a functioning network as it currently stands. Nodes consistently become out of sync with the rest of the network, which has caused a lot of drama because the exchanges that list Rai had to shut down deposit/withdrawals for weeks. It's only recently that most of those exchanges were able to enable deposit/withdrawals by implementing a workaround provided by the Rai team. But it's far from stable and there is not yet a permanent solution to the Node issues. Even their wallet has consistent sync issues, resulting in the Node getting stuck to the point of having to download a snapshot of the network to be able to get caught up. But, with all that said, I have yet to find a cryptocurrency that left me more impressed than Rai has. My first transaction took 2 seconds to appear in my wallet.
saosebastiao 9y ago
It looks really promising. Unfortunately, it can only be bought on two relatively unknown exchanges.
- Kiro 9y ago
  They won the Binance community vote so it will be there soon.
misiti3780 9y ago
how did you go about buying it ?

desireco42 9y ago

Stellar which they mention as alternative would probably suit them way better. It doesn't have any of the issues that were problem with Bitcoin, but it's adoption is significantly less. Litecoin support would be very nice to have, it is kind of obvious step for transaction processing.

lavezzi 9y ago
Would prefer them to be looking into other coins such as Raiblocks.
- desireco42 9y ago
  Yeah Raiblocks is pretty interesting too. I really like what developer had done.

swanson 9y ago

Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel.

ChristianBundy 9y ago
FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar.

vit05 9y ago

This is great news and opportunity for OmiseGO, Ethereum and Stellar. Solid projects with respectful and well know developers team that do not directly compete against Bitcoin.

bdcravens 9y ago

We've used the Bitcoin integration since it was in beta (I even got a Stripe t-shirt for pointing out a small bug) but I don't think we've ever received a single Bitcoin payment. The workflow is too jarring (copy and paste a Bitcoin address to make a payment elsewhere, then come back). Additionally, refunds are tricky: everything's immediately converted to fiat, so the customer needs to know they won't (or are extremely unlikely to) get the same amount of Bitcoin back. Obviously these issues are true independent of current fee and transaction time story.

sincerely 9y ago

Another day, another HN title changed without any clear rationale. Was the original "Stripe ends Bitcoin support" really so bad that it had to be changed to "Ending Bitcoin Support"?

mankyd 9y ago
They have a policy of _always_ changing it to match the title of the linked article. Most of the time this is either an improvement or (as in this case) neutral. I do wish they'd allow a little more editorializing, quite frankly. The linked title is not _always_ an improvement.
- sincerely 9y ago
  Ah! That's interesting, I didn't realize it was an official policy. Given that, wouldn't it make sense to generate the post titles from the <title> element of the link automatically?
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Title changes are still allowed when the title is too long, misleading, or provides no information about the contents.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  Agreed; this would be far more useful having "Stripe" in the title as I had to click through to see who was ending to and couldn't just grok it.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Not _always_; titles change when they're linkbait. Here, though, Stripe is already in the story title, and the "Stripe ends" preface suggests that it's a story being written about Stripe, rather than Stripe writing for themselves.

marenkay 9y ago

Is it just me or did they just cancel BTC support as it fails to provide what BTC was touted to give to the people? In turn doesn't this imply mined coins as they are pretty much are useless for anyone except those having monetary assets in the first place?

gthtjtkt 9y ago

This is the main reason Litecoin exists. Strange that they decided not to use it...

detaro 9y ago
Not popular enough yet if I understand the article right.
lawn 9y ago
Litecoin failed to gain the network effect which is so crucial for a currency. It never had a roadmap other than copying what Bitcoin did. It's not even a cheap coin to use compared to the alternatives. There's no reason to use Litecoin over Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum or Monero at this point.
- gthtjtkt 9y ago
  Litecoin volume has regularly been $1 billion+ per day during the past several months, and Ethereum has been suffering from the same issues as Bitcoin. LTC's median transaction fee is literally pennies, you don't think that's cheap? The fact that you think ETH is more suitable for use as a currency only shows how little you know about crypto. ETH isn't even meant to be a currency.

ivanstame 9y ago

This is the snowflake that starts everything :)

CryoLogic 9y ago

IOTA can actually handle great TPS unlike bitcoin. BTC is maybe 10TPS cap while IOTA is pushing towards 2k TPS which is what Visa can do.

bpicolo 9y ago
The Visa argument has always been silly. Visa has an average transaction rate of 2000/s, and can support ~50,000/s. They support 25x the overhead of their actual rate. If Visa needed to support 1,000,000 tps, they would do it. That tech is much easier to develop centrally than in a blockchain-distributed network. They just don't have any reason to do it because they match the scale they care about already.
lawn 9y ago
Damn lot's of people are pushing their favorite coin. Here are some reasons IOTA is a shitcoin and cannot ever replace Bitcoin: 1. No decentralized solution to the double spend problem. The very reason Bitcoin exists IOTA fails at. 2. Dev team is so incompetent they tried to implement their own cryptographic hash function and predictably failed. 3. Mass buzzwords: Quantum proof, ternary(!), Internet of Things, instant transactions, no fees! Everything is perfect! 4. They have no solution to spam. POW is the only cost to transactions but it's extremely low so dedicated computers can outspend everyone else. With the way the tangle works this in practice mean transactions won't be confirmed. 5. Their network doesn't even work properly with users trying or hours to get their transaction accepted by the network. There are more but I can't be bothered.

stevewilhelm 9y ago

> Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. I would say it has evolved to become an instrument for speculation or a hedge against a local currency's volatility.

nadam 9y ago

If cryptocurrencies really succeed, we will not need a centralized service like Stripe. Hopefully we will use a 'decentralized Stripe' (as far as I know the Dash Evolution platform will be sometinhg like that. Maybe that is the reason that they did not even mention Dash in the article, despite it being one of the most promising digital Cash system on the market.)

Casseres 9y ago
I'd rather not use a coin that requires the use of masternodes - let everyone's vote be equal and not make it a requirement to be rich in order to vote. Also there's no way to prove that a few people don't own a majority of the masternodes. With the huge instamine and the creator's refusual to restart the coin, it's just too sketchy for me to ever trust.

fpgaminer 9y ago

It is amazing the number of shallow comments shouting doom and gloom over news like this and others (Steam, etc). Must be the end of Bitcoin because transaction fees are too high! And more generally everyone shouting doom and gloom over high transaction fees. Let's stop and think about this critically for once. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are high. And that's somehow a bad thing? By that same logic it's bad that Apple can charge so much for their phones. $800 phones are so ridiculous. No one can buy the phones! And Apple is clearly a failing business because of it. It's bad that Tesla is able to charge $70k+ for the Model S. Tesla is a failing business with no future prospects. The experiment is over. Time to buy Chevy Volts instead. Everyone sell TSLA because the Model S is too expensive! The interpretation that high Bitcoin transaction fees is somehow bad and signals the end of Bitcoin is just so ludicrous when subjected to even an ounce of critical thinking. Bitcoin transaction fees are high because Bitcoin transactions are _valuable_. Because people are willing to pay that much to make a transaction on a network that secures their transaction in an immutable, public record stored redundantly on 10,000+ machines. We should see this as a massive signal that Bitcoin is _successful_. That demand for its technology grew beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The fact that Stripe and other payment platforms can no longer use the technology is disappointing, but for different reasons. So to re-iterate my point one last time, Bitcoin has succeeded in the same way that Tesla succeeded. It made a Model S blockchain, and people are clamoring over one another to get access to it. Of course, I would be remiss to ignore one valid complaint about high fees. Bitcoin's goal was to free the masses from the entrenched banking system. Part of the banking system is making small, every day transactions. In that regard, Bitcoin has yet to succeed. Going back to my analogy, we can see that Tesla hasn't succeeded in a similar regard either; we don't see electric cars in the hands of the average person. But that's not because the technology has failed. That's because we haven't gotten there yet. It's a long road yet. We'll get there. The world doesn't change in 9 years. The banking system won't be overturned in a decade. But we have a beachhead. Bitcoin is just getting started.

deleted 9y ago
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thebiglebrewski 9y ago
I'm sorry, but saying Bitcoin succeeded like the Model S succeeded is an argument that just holds no water to me at all. That makes no sense.

thickblockchain 9y ago

Yeah, but who really cares? 95% of people buy, sell and transfer Bitcoin to do one thing: speculating on Crypto-Assets. It really doesn't matter if the fees are so high, it's not like people buy crypto like candy, they buy it like stocks. Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? That's still cheap compared to other methods of international money transfer. People are obviously ready to spend that much. Bitcoin has always been terrible as an everyday currency, even when transactions were practically free and fast, who wanted to wait 10 minutes to confirm their purchase of a Grand Latte? Just pay with any of the existing methods, they work just fine, it's a solved problem. There's probably 1000 cryptocurrencies that could work for that just fine, but nobody really needs that in the first place. You gotta realize that Bitcoin is gonna be worth A MILLION dollars or maybe just one dollar, but then it could go back up to a thousand again! That is the real value of Bitcoin.

kbhn 9y ago
> Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? Because Bitcoin wasn't originally designed for speculating on cryptocurrencies.

smnplk 9y ago

Stripe,please just add support for RaiBlocks.

m3kw9 9y ago

What did you expect? They are in the business of making transactions, bitcoin isn’t anymore.

skywhopper 9y ago

I'd just like to gripe a bit about the use of "fiat currency" as an antonym of "cryptocurrency". Bitcoin may not be similar in all respects to typical government-issued money, but it is far more similar to fiat currency than to hard currency: its supply is artificially controlled, and Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. Bitcoin is administered by a de facto government in the form of the miners that run the network. That this government does not have a direct correlation to a UN-recognized nation-state does not make Bitcoin any less artificial or more real.

stephen_g 9y ago
Bitcoin isn't like real money though. Take the US dollar - whatever happens, something like 300 million people and tens of millions of companies will still need to pay taxes in that currency. That's a big baseline demand, before you even consider the goods and services available in the economy that can be bought with US dollars. Whereas everybody trading bitcoin or accepting it as a payment method could switch to a different cryptocurrency tomorrow...

Sonnol53 9y ago

Beautifully written! I will take note.

featherverse 9y ago

SELL NOW.

alexnewman 9y ago

A little late to the party stripe. Bitcoin has been slow forever. Why now? It is just about to launch lightning or whatever.

mansilladev 9y ago

If they'd only listened when I suggested they go with Dogecoin. Dogeconomics axiom: 1Ð = 1Ð such finance. many simple. wow.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kristianp 9y ago

Weird, they seemed to time it just as the Bitcoin Lightning Network is starting to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-first-ever-physical-purchase-on-lightning-network https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-...

sytelus 9y ago

TLDR; Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

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consultSKI 9y ago

this is a good read for the reasons cited. it made no sense (or cents) for stripe or anyone else to put bitcoin on top of networks with traditional fees. i love stripe and hope they continue to allow me operate various businesses without the need for a traditional bank or processor. can't wait for them to do an IPO and pay off the VCs so i use them for my firearms clients.

confounded 9y ago

I hope that Stripe consider support for GNU Taler! https://gnutaler.org/ https://gnutaler.org/

paulrd 9y ago
That website is a fake website. The real one is taler.net. See the discussion in the email list: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.htm...
- confounded 9y ago
  Wow, that’s pretty serious, thank you for pointing it out!