9 ms·

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 guara

by 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?
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      You don't have to regulate the transactions, you just have to regulate the usage of them.
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      With Bitcoin that problem may be somewhat short lived. The blockchain is forever. Once unmasked, your permanent, irrevocable, and cryptographically-verified transaction log is sitting in the open for all the world to analyze. Doesn't matter how many years it's been since you've done business. Doesn't matter if you knew that the random dude you bought an antique thimble from was a political dissident or not. You still sent money to that btc address, that address owned by a terrorist, and now they're gonna wanna know why you were funding terrorism...
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera. Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: money laundering charges against the schmuck who didn't keep books and records. Arrest someone who conducted a fraud, Ponzi scheme, ransomware scam or terrorist financing? If they did it with cash, the money is gone. If they did it with Bitoin, you have the option of tracing forward and seizing the funds the moment they hit a known wallet.
- nwah1 9y ago
  Your comment amounts to "I don't know why anyone would use X when they can use these other two things that are fundamentally the same."
  - rwcarlsen 9y ago
    His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.
    - nwah1 9y ago
      Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.
      - rwcarlsen 9y ago
        Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation. You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.
        tfha 9y ago
        Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now
- garmaine 9y ago
  Use bitcoin with lightning.
  - sydd 9y ago
    Money is serious business, why would anyone rely on a network that was released days ago? Also it defeats the main guarantee of Bitcoin - that everything can be trusted. Bitcoin would have had a great future if the big guys werent so greedy and sacrifised a little of their wealth for the benefit of the whole community. Since they refused to do so (=refusing any attempt to make BTC transfers faster and cheaper) the network is choking itself (=it takes days for a transaction to be confirmed, it costs >$30) and the community is thorn between altcoins. We will see how this will play out, but my hunch is that we will see a huge market collapse and a "restart" by one of the emerging altcoins that solves the issues that came up with Bitcoin.
    - raverbashing 9y ago
      People (and service providers) just need to vote with their wallet Start accepting BCH, Dash, etc, if lightning works out great, go back to BTC, if not, the alternatives are there (Of course they can look at ETH, XRP, Monero, but accepting bitcoin forks is easier if the BTC infrastructure is already there)
      - kuschku 9y ago
        But that doesn't work. When marketing a new product, you get at most one chance to do it right. If you fuck that up, you won't get a second chance. No payment provider is going to take the same risks for BCH again that they took for BTC. No merchant, and also most consumers won't.
    - igorgue 9y ago
      It does not take days and it's not more than 30 bucks to send.
- nickthemagicman 9y ago
  Monero is fast as well.
  - tdurden 9y ago
    Sure, for now (and maybe in the future too?) - the thing is that every crypto is fast before it hits bitcoin scale.
    - Casseres 9y ago
      Monero's block size scales automatically.
      - nickthemagicman 9y ago
        Thanks was going to post this.
- bparsons 9y ago
  I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.
  - eosrei 9y ago
    FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
    - Operyl 9y ago
      I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.
      - wyager 9y ago
        Working implementations exist and are usable, but they are being very cautious before releasing to the general public.
      - Mahn 9y ago
        It exists in its early stages, but it's terribly impractical, hence no exchange or end user is in a rush to adopt it. Its design is almost like someone took a hard look at Bitcoin and concluded "Gee, this is not cumbersome enough for people, we need to make transacting a worse and more confusing experience".
      - grubles 9y ago
        I demoed [0] receiving one tenths of a cent's worth of bitcoin (0.00000010 BTC) instantly, and on Bitcoin's mainnet (not a test network). I also demoed [1] purchasing swag from Blockstream's store [2] which is powered by their newly released Wordpress e-commerce plugin [3] that enables Lightning payments. I did not screencapture the videos because Qubes dom0 does not come OOTB with screenrecording software, and I don't want to enable networking in dom0 to install software that does. [0]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 [1]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 [2]https://store.blockstream.com/ https://store.blockstream.com/ [3]https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  lighting network is pretty fast now. bitcoin cash will have the same problems like bitcoin once is growing in size. not a solution.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    <snark>Bitcoin was pretty fast when practically nobody was using it too...
- pcarolan 9y ago
  Here's a good rundown: https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-trends/ https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-tren...
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  The argument that makes sense to me is that Bitcoin is just “Digital Gold”. But I don’t really understand why gold has so much value, so maybe it’s not really a good answer. It’s kind of like saying “Maybe Bitcoins will have value for a long time just like this other non-valuable, non-transaction asset that’s had value for a long time”...
  - uncletammy 9y ago
    Bitcoin's strategy is exactly that. And it would be a GREAT strategy if there was something about Bitcoin that made it the best "digital gold" available. Sadly, the only property it shares with gold is that it's hard to move. In fact, Bitcoin Cash is functionally identical to Bitcoin and it's easy to move. That's ignoring the hundreds of other digital currencies not named Bitcoin which make a better "digital gold".
    - matt4077 9y ago
      Bitcoin doesn't have a strategy. The "value store" narrative is a post-hoc rationalisation for its continued, yet less and less rational, existence. The proof that Bitcoin was intended as an alternative to cash, and to be used for small, everyday transactions is right there in the name: It's Bit"coin", not Bitgold, or even Bitbill.
  - dmoy 9y ago
    Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      Value as a currency.
      - 9y ago
- csomar 9y ago
  The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit. Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.
  - Aunche 9y ago
    Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.
    - zanny 9y ago
      If the International perception of gold being valuable disappeared overnight (which... yeah, won't happen unless someone discovers legit alchemy magic) the difference between losing 90% of your value or 100% if it had no use outside of the speculation shouldn't be influencing almost anyones decision in what to invest in. All the other parameters (volatility, profitability, etc) are way more important than if you are completely bankrupt or completely fucked if the market implodes.
      - Aunche 9y ago
        My point is that gold can never lose 90% of its value because the majority of it is already used in luxury items and electronics. At worst, the total value of gold can only drop by the current amount that is being held in reserve or as investments.
        bryanlarsen 9y ago
        Price is set at the margin. If half the demand for gold evaporated the price for gold would likely drop a lot more than 50%, probably more than 90%. When demand for gasoline went up by 2%, the price doubled.
        9y ago
- uncletammy 9y ago
  > I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. There's a great use case in suckering honest people into holding your bags using the promise of instant wealth. EDIT: Added quote
- hluch 9y ago
  There are several use cases. 1. Paying merchants who don't accept any other cryptocurrency (which is the majority of the available ones; typically they accept fiat in some form, plus Bitcoin since it's been around so long, but have barely heard of others). 2. Donations, same as above. 3. As an onramp from fiat to other cryptocurrencies, where those are accepted and Bitcoin BTC transaction fees for 1 confirmation in a reasonable time are an excessively high portion of the transaction amount. 4. For cryptocurrency payments which need the very highest possible level of security against double-spends, which is provided by Bitcoin's hashrate and decentralization, arising from there being a mature community around it. As far as I can tell, none of the other currencies have equally good metrics, though they do approach it. Plus a few more. And not forgetting that Bitcoin Core could in future raise the block size, making each unit increase sharply in utility and value, beyond its natural deflationary increase.
- lhl 9y ago
  As a preface, I am long-term bearish on Bitcoin, and have been since it became apparent to me that the community and development process had basically been terminally broken in 2016 - everything that's happened since then has been utterly predictable, and I'm pretty sure that while it might not go away, it's basically a legacy product. That being said, Bitcoin currently has the highest market liquidity (trading volume, markets, stability, convertability) and has the most mature investment infrastructure. It has the most fiat rails and trading pairs (almost all alt markets are pegged to BTC) and for moving sufficiently large sums around internationally it can still be considered relatively fast and cheap. There's a large SoV use case for a cryptoasset that is censorship and seizure resistant, although personally, I have questions on whether something can be a long term SoV if it doesn't functional well as a MoE (maybe Gold proves the case). Also, I feel like the financial side is currently not very savvy on the actual blockchain mechanics side of things and agree that it seems like you would absolutely want to use the most private blockchain you could find for SoV, but I don't have much expertise in that part of the world (offshore assets, wealth management, etc). While it feels like we're a bit in '98 for the speculative bubble after last year, for blockchains/DLT, I think we're maybe '94 on the tech. Still, cryptoassets have seemed to make a jump to a legitimate asset class last year, one that's big enough for the financial world to pay attention to, and that has some very interesting investment properties and a lot of potential (when I sat down to total up the amount of long term economic impact, I came to the conclusion that it may be a bigger deal than the Internet.)
- just_one_time_ 9y ago
  Ask Greg Maxwell. He is "popping the champagne" for reaching his goal of having a always full mempool (Greg is CTO of Blockstream and GitHub repo owner for Bitcoin Core.
nebulous1 9y ago
If they "cancel" the transaction but it later ends up getting mined, who pays the fee for the return transaction? Regardless of the answer, variable and large fees really do make this sort of transaction a minefield.
- vec 9y ago
  If money came in after an hour, they would immediately send an email to the customer asking for a refund address. My understanding is that the customer ate the first fee and Stripe ate the second. We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    >We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers. There are actually bitcoin users out there who aren't up-to-date on how long it takes to process a transaction?
    - tessierashpool 9y ago
      Bitcoin’s tech-savvy early adopters phase was years ago. Users like that are probably the majority now.
- paulmd 9y ago
  With BitPay at least, you pay fees both ways. They'll refund you whatever they got minus the $40 of transaction fees to get it back to you. And of course they charge you the single-transaction rate, while they do a batch transaction that them costs much less (i.e. they are making money off refunds). Happened to me a few weeks ago - I tried to buy something and it got confirmed, but not fast enough for Bitpay, and they cancelled the transaction. So I was out the fees both ways. It was unpleasant, but not surprising, given how shoddy the whole system is. Everything is fees with Bitcoin - fees for transactions, fees for exchanges, fees for mining pools, dev fees for mining applications, etc. There are no end of middlemen, and they all have their hand out. Sure, each of them is providing some legitimate service, but it sure makes 3% merchant fees for Visa look positively cheap in comparison. And did I mention the instant transaction times, the fraud protection, and the complimentary hardware token that's accepted by millions of businesses worldwide!? Try a credit card today!
ActsJuvenile 9y ago
I am curious why you wanted Bitcoin on your site. It has been dead as a payment mechanism for a long time. BitPay is a dead man walking, save for all the mining hardware purchases denominated in Bitcoins.
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  The PR value! People write stories about you when you accept Bitcoin!
regularhackerer 9y ago
I just used the bitcoin stripe thing couple days ago. Time limit was indeed quite scary: they had a timer on the side running with something like 15 minutes to go until you need to request a new temporary address. Mine ran out but luckily it was still accepted.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  What were you trying to buy?
- lawn 9y ago
  Same here. Luckily I got confirmed in time as well. For the interested I donated to charity water: https://www.charitywater.org/ https://www.charitywater.org/
naveen99 9y ago
Takes the same 10 minutes on average per block if you include recommended miner fee. binance credits you after 2 confirmations. waiting for 6 confirmations is really overkill for transactions small enough that you are worried about the fee. So in practice, a transactions will either sit for a long time or be confirmed in 10 minutes. Just pay appropriate fee.
- Natanael_L 9y ago
  The problem is that the fees grow when there's a large backlog of transactions. And if the transactions grow faster than there's new blocks to process them, then the backlog grows infinitely and no amount of fees will ever get them all into the blockchain simultaneously. We need second layer solutions like Lightning Network, and the Bitcoin Core developers should have listened 5+ years ago when a huge fraction of the community back then warned about exactly these problems, and asked for a plan for larger blocks. Back then we were told it's not a problem, won't happen, can be solved easily, etc... Right now some people says it's obviously working well because people are obviously willing to pay the transaction fees. These people are ignoring the long term effects of killing off important usecases and reducing demand, and that some only pay the fees so they can cash out. They don't understand psychology, and barely grasp the numbers.

by vec 9y ago

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?
- freeone3000 9y ago
  Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    You don't have to regulate the transactions, you just have to regulate the usage of them.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    With Bitcoin that problem may be somewhat short lived. The blockchain is forever. Once unmasked, your permanent, irrevocable, and cryptographically-verified transaction log is sitting in the open for all the world to analyze. Doesn't matter how many years it's been since you've done business. Doesn't matter if you knew that the random dude you bought an antique thimble from was a political dissident or not. You still sent money to that btc address, that address owned by a terrorist, and now they're gonna wanna know why you were funding terrorism...
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera. Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: money laundering charges against the schmuck who didn't keep books and records. Arrest someone who conducted a fraud, Ponzi scheme, ransomware scam or terrorist financing? If they did it with cash, the money is gone. If they did it with Bitoin, you have the option of tracing forward and seizing the funds the moment they hit a known wallet.
nwah1 9y ago
Your comment amounts to "I don't know why anyone would use X when they can use these other two things that are fundamentally the same."
- rwcarlsen 9y ago
  His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.
    - rwcarlsen 9y ago
      Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation. You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.
      - tfha 9y ago
        Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now
garmaine 9y ago
Use bitcoin with lightning.
- sydd 9y ago
  Money is serious business, why would anyone rely on a network that was released days ago? Also it defeats the main guarantee of Bitcoin - that everything can be trusted. Bitcoin would have had a great future if the big guys werent so greedy and sacrifised a little of their wealth for the benefit of the whole community. Since they refused to do so (=refusing any attempt to make BTC transfers faster and cheaper) the network is choking itself (=it takes days for a transaction to be confirmed, it costs >$30) and the community is thorn between altcoins. We will see how this will play out, but my hunch is that we will see a huge market collapse and a "restart" by one of the emerging altcoins that solves the issues that came up with Bitcoin.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    People (and service providers) just need to vote with their wallet Start accepting BCH, Dash, etc, if lightning works out great, go back to BTC, if not, the alternatives are there (Of course they can look at ETH, XRP, Monero, but accepting bitcoin forks is easier if the BTC infrastructure is already there)
    - kuschku 9y ago
      But that doesn't work. When marketing a new product, you get at most one chance to do it right. If you fuck that up, you won't get a second chance. No payment provider is going to take the same risks for BCH again that they took for BTC. No merchant, and also most consumers won't.
  - igorgue 9y ago
    It does not take days and it's not more than 30 bucks to send.
nickthemagicman 9y ago
Monero is fast as well.
- tdurden 9y ago
  Sure, for now (and maybe in the future too?) - the thing is that every crypto is fast before it hits bitcoin scale.
  - Casseres 9y ago
    Monero's block size scales automatically.
    - nickthemagicman 9y ago
      Thanks was going to post this.
bparsons 9y ago
I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.
- eosrei 9y ago
  FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
  - Operyl 9y ago
    I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.
    - wyager 9y ago
      Working implementations exist and are usable, but they are being very cautious before releasing to the general public.
    - Mahn 9y ago
      It exists in its early stages, but it's terribly impractical, hence no exchange or end user is in a rush to adopt it. Its design is almost like someone took a hard look at Bitcoin and concluded "Gee, this is not cumbersome enough for people, we need to make transacting a worse and more confusing experience".
    - grubles 9y ago
      I demoed [0] receiving one tenths of a cent's worth of bitcoin (0.00000010 BTC) instantly, and on Bitcoin's mainnet (not a test network). I also demoed [1] purchasing swag from Blockstream's store [2] which is powered by their newly released Wordpress e-commerce plugin [3] that enables Lightning payments. I did not screencapture the videos because Qubes dom0 does not come OOTB with screenrecording software, and I don't want to enable networking in dom0 to install software that does. [0]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 [1]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 [2]https://store.blockstream.com/ https://store.blockstream.com/ [3]https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html
PunchTornado 9y ago
lighting network is pretty fast now. bitcoin cash will have the same problems like bitcoin once is growing in size. not a solution.
- bigiain 9y ago
  <snark>Bitcoin was pretty fast when practically nobody was using it too...
pcarolan 9y ago
Here's a good rundown: https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-trends/ https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-tren...
tuna-piano 9y ago
The argument that makes sense to me is that Bitcoin is just “Digital Gold”. But I don’t really understand why gold has so much value, so maybe it’s not really a good answer. It’s kind of like saying “Maybe Bitcoins will have value for a long time just like this other non-valuable, non-transaction asset that’s had value for a long time”...
- uncletammy 9y ago
  Bitcoin's strategy is exactly that. And it would be a GREAT strategy if there was something about Bitcoin that made it the best "digital gold" available. Sadly, the only property it shares with gold is that it's hard to move. In fact, Bitcoin Cash is functionally identical to Bitcoin and it's easy to move. That's ignoring the hundreds of other digital currencies not named Bitcoin which make a better "digital gold".
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't have a strategy. The "value store" narrative is a post-hoc rationalisation for its continued, yet less and less rational, existence. The proof that Bitcoin was intended as an alternative to cash, and to be used for small, everyday transactions is right there in the name: It's Bit"coin", not Bitgold, or even Bitbill.
- dmoy 9y ago
  Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Value as a currency.
    - 9y ago
csomar 9y ago
The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit. Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.
- Aunche 9y ago
  Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.
  - zanny 9y ago
    If the International perception of gold being valuable disappeared overnight (which... yeah, won't happen unless someone discovers legit alchemy magic) the difference between losing 90% of your value or 100% if it had no use outside of the speculation shouldn't be influencing almost anyones decision in what to invest in. All the other parameters (volatility, profitability, etc) are way more important than if you are completely bankrupt or completely fucked if the market implodes.
    - Aunche 9y ago
      My point is that gold can never lose 90% of its value because the majority of it is already used in luxury items and electronics. At worst, the total value of gold can only drop by the current amount that is being held in reserve or as investments.
      - bryanlarsen 9y ago
        Price is set at the margin. If half the demand for gold evaporated the price for gold would likely drop a lot more than 50%, probably more than 90%. When demand for gasoline went up by 2%, the price doubled.
      - 9y ago
uncletammy 9y ago
> I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. There's a great use case in suckering honest people into holding your bags using the promise of instant wealth. EDIT: Added quote
hluch 9y ago
There are several use cases. 1. Paying merchants who don't accept any other cryptocurrency (which is the majority of the available ones; typically they accept fiat in some form, plus Bitcoin since it's been around so long, but have barely heard of others). 2. Donations, same as above. 3. As an onramp from fiat to other cryptocurrencies, where those are accepted and Bitcoin BTC transaction fees for 1 confirmation in a reasonable time are an excessively high portion of the transaction amount. 4. For cryptocurrency payments which need the very highest possible level of security against double-spends, which is provided by Bitcoin's hashrate and decentralization, arising from there being a mature community around it. As far as I can tell, none of the other currencies have equally good metrics, though they do approach it. Plus a few more. And not forgetting that Bitcoin Core could in future raise the block size, making each unit increase sharply in utility and value, beyond its natural deflationary increase.
lhl 9y ago
As a preface, I am long-term bearish on Bitcoin, and have been since it became apparent to me that the community and development process had basically been terminally broken in 2016 - everything that's happened since then has been utterly predictable, and I'm pretty sure that while it might not go away, it's basically a legacy product. That being said, Bitcoin currently has the highest market liquidity (trading volume, markets, stability, convertability) and has the most mature investment infrastructure. It has the most fiat rails and trading pairs (almost all alt markets are pegged to BTC) and for moving sufficiently large sums around internationally it can still be considered relatively fast and cheap. There's a large SoV use case for a cryptoasset that is censorship and seizure resistant, although personally, I have questions on whether something can be a long term SoV if it doesn't functional well as a MoE (maybe Gold proves the case). Also, I feel like the financial side is currently not very savvy on the actual blockchain mechanics side of things and agree that it seems like you would absolutely want to use the most private blockchain you could find for SoV, but I don't have much expertise in that part of the world (offshore assets, wealth management, etc). While it feels like we're a bit in '98 for the speculative bubble after last year, for blockchains/DLT, I think we're maybe '94 on the tech. Still, cryptoassets have seemed to make a jump to a legitimate asset class last year, one that's big enough for the financial world to pay attention to, and that has some very interesting investment properties and a lot of potential (when I sat down to total up the amount of long term economic impact, I came to the conclusion that it may be a bigger deal than the Internet.)
just_one_time_ 9y ago
Ask Greg Maxwell. He is "popping the champagne" for reaching his goal of having a always full mempool (Greg is CTO of Blockstream and GitHub repo owner for Bitcoin Core.

nebulous1 9y ago

If they "cancel" the transaction but it later ends up getting mined, who pays the fee for the return transaction? Regardless of the answer, variable and large fees really do make this sort of transaction a minefield.

vec 9y ago
If money came in after an hour, they would immediately send an email to the customer asking for a refund address. My understanding is that the customer ate the first fee and Stripe ate the second. We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.
- freehunter 9y ago
  >We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers. There are actually bitcoin users out there who aren't up-to-date on how long it takes to process a transaction?
  - tessierashpool 9y ago
    Bitcoin’s tech-savvy early adopters phase was years ago. Users like that are probably the majority now.
paulmd 9y ago
With BitPay at least, you pay fees both ways. They'll refund you whatever they got minus the $40 of transaction fees to get it back to you. And of course they charge you the single-transaction rate, while they do a batch transaction that them costs much less (i.e. they are making money off refunds). Happened to me a few weeks ago - I tried to buy something and it got confirmed, but not fast enough for Bitpay, and they cancelled the transaction. So I was out the fees both ways. It was unpleasant, but not surprising, given how shoddy the whole system is. Everything is fees with Bitcoin - fees for transactions, fees for exchanges, fees for mining pools, dev fees for mining applications, etc. There are no end of middlemen, and they all have their hand out. Sure, each of them is providing some legitimate service, but it sure makes 3% merchant fees for Visa look positively cheap in comparison. And did I mention the instant transaction times, the fraud protection, and the complimentary hardware token that's accepted by millions of businesses worldwide!? Try a credit card today!

ActsJuvenile 9y ago

I am curious why you wanted Bitcoin on your site. It has been dead as a payment mechanism for a long time. BitPay is a dead man walking, save for all the mining hardware purchases denominated in Bitcoins.

tuna-piano 9y ago
The PR value! People write stories about you when you accept Bitcoin!

regularhackerer 9y ago

I just used the bitcoin stripe thing couple days ago. Time limit was indeed quite scary: they had a timer on the side running with something like 15 minutes to go until you need to request a new temporary address. Mine ran out but luckily it was still accepted.

Symbiote 9y ago
What were you trying to buy?
lawn 9y ago
Same here. Luckily I got confirmed in time as well. For the interested I donated to charity water: https://www.charitywater.org/ https://www.charitywater.org/

naveen99 9y ago

Takes the same 10 minutes on average per block if you include recommended miner fee. binance credits you after 2 confirmations. waiting for 6 confirmations is really overkill for transactions small enough that you are worried about the fee. So in practice, a transactions will either sit for a long time or be confirmed in 10 minutes. Just pay appropriate fee.

Natanael_L 9y ago
The problem is that the fees grow when there's a large backlog of transactions. And if the transactions grow faster than there's new blocks to process them, then the backlog grows infinitely and no amount of fees will ever get them all into the blockchain simultaneously. We need second layer solutions like Lightning Network, and the Bitcoin Core developers should have listened 5+ years ago when a huge fraction of the community back then warned about exactly these problems, and asked for a plan for larger blocks. Back then we were told it's not a problem, won't happen, can be solved easily, etc... Right now some people says it's obviously working well because people are obviously willing to pay the transaction fees. These people are ignoring the long term effects of killing off important usecases and reducing demand, and that some only pay the fees so they can cash out. They don't understand psychology, and barely grasp the numbers.