6 ms·

Difficulties of providing a crypto payment system on your website

21 points by ben165 4y ago

shp0ngle 4y ago
The biggest error is to assume people want to pay with cryptocurrency. They just want to speculate on it; first buy, then sell. Nobody actually pays with cryptocurrency. edit: ahh it’s in the actual article. Never mind.
- herbst 4y ago
  To be fair that assumption is wrong if you look at more weird specific niches. Crypto payments definitely have a place, also outside of drug markets.
  - knorker 4y ago
    Like what?
    - herbst 4y ago
      Porn, SMM, basically any international digital services on the PayPal blacklist.
      - knorker 4y ago
        Porn: I'm not up to speed on the cryptocurrency use in porn. Shouldn't this run into consumer protection issues? That is: while it and debit cards don't guarantee as simple a chargeback as a credit card, there are still laws here. So let's say pornhub takes bitcoin (can't check, as I'm in a public place). It still needs a refunds and frauds department for those payments, no? And pornhub does take credit cards. Yes, the fees are higher. But largely because the chargebacks are more common (spouse finds out, buyer feigns ignorance). What's SSM in this context?
        herbst 4y ago
        Smm = Social media marketing, buying likes and that stuff. It's a huge market actually. Porn sites also heavily set on crypto to pay their creators, paying out is even more an issue than charging in such markets. I don't understand where the issue with refunding crypto should be. It's also way cheaper than what stripe, PayPal or co charges if users issue refunds. Personally I only save money by using crypto, I save thousands of dollars in transaction and chargeback fees every year. For me as merchants it's a non brainer. I also use crypto as a customer but I usually trust these companies before I send money. The swiss Amazon is accepting crypto for example, as customer I trust them and all customer protections laws apply as well.
        knorker 4y ago
        > I save thousands of dollars in transaction and chargeback fees every year Honest question: Have you run that past a lawyer? Chargebacks are partially based in law, so while you could be saving money now, it could be by building up more and more legal liability and risk. But maybe you'll be fine, because you refund any and all refund requests.
- TekMol 4y ago
  I would love to pay with crypto. Every time I type my credit card number into some web form I think "Damn, I hope the number will not end up in some shady hands causing me trouble". I had my credit card disabled once because someone started using it to buy stuff with it around the world. What a freaking hassle. Telephone calls, letters, several days without a CC, had to change the number everywhere .. annoying. Paying a lightning invoice does not bear such risks.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    You know that lots of card providers can generate virtual cards for free on demand these days right? Another set of details that works the same as your original card but can be used for, say, just one site and cancelled at any time if it gets misused. If that's your only gripe than that's probably the easier way than switching to an entirely separate financial system.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      It is not realistic to generate a virtual card for each purchase. It creates a documentation headache as well, such as handling returns and payment proofs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - verdverm 4y ago
        I expect credit cards to become more like private keys in time, managed by the company, and transactions will have unique tokens so that your real number is never passed to the vendor. Blockchain like ideas will be implemented in "TradFi" without the overhead of blockchain.
  - desindol 4y ago
    You are saying that you rather would have your crypto wallet stolen instead of your credit card?
- 0x64 4y ago
  How come? There's no speculation in stablecoins, USD-following or not. Especially if you transact on a layer-2 solution, it's quite convenient.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    That couldn't be further than the truth. It's just a more convenient way of trading forex.
sentrms 4y ago
As a crypto enthusiast I looked into what it would take to accept ADA payments on my membership site without relying on a payment provider. I was surprised by the quality of the documentation and realized it was quite feasible to implement. I decided against it as the sentiment around crypto (even a proof of stake chain like Cardano) would probably have a negative net result on customer acquisition and retention. It would have been a fun endeavour with a potential poor outcome.
- ben165 4y ago
  Yes, that's a big problem. You might harm your reputation including a Crypto payment option.
  - pvinis 4y ago
    There are people, myself included, that appreciate a crypto payment inclusion. I am proud to say I have used crypto to buy a physical souvenir, a steam game, and a yearly subscription to a service. I would gladly do that more if they allow me.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Just out of curiosity. What is the fraction of these transactions in crypto compared to those with other payment methods?
      - pvinis 4y ago
        Compared to my other transactions? Very small. The best "comparison" I can make is this: - I buy random shit online every now and then, also from Amazon. That one souvenir I got for me and a friend was about 40 dollars worth, and I paid with crypto that time. - I buy steam games maybe one every 3 months? So buying that one game with crypto is a small percentage, yes, but also probably the next game I'll get will also be with crypto payment, so it will increase the percentage slowly? - For the service, I have paid maybe 15 dollars for similar services in my life. That one that accepts crypto is also the best one I have found yet, and to that I have paid about 80 dollars so far. So for that, the percentage is up there, and I'll continue paying them that way!
yunohn 4y ago
Maybe I misunderstand the author’s goal, but using the “random number” from the payment amount and regularly checking wallet balance, just seem incredibly rudimentary compared to an actual payments system…
- FabHK 4y ago
  Yes. And using a "unique" number between 0 and 99 gives you an indication of how many transactions this system is designed to support. (Not many, it seems to me.)
- NavinF 4y ago
  Yeah normally you’d create a new address to receive payments from each user. Addresses are essentially free so this is how everyone else figures out which user deposited money into their cryptocurrency wallet.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    That also seems like an inefficient way to handle transactions. This is honestly surprisingly, I always assumed crypto had better payment solutions! After all, that’s what they all proclaim to be - not speculative gambling or scamming.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      Ehh I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending from or use the memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned. The latter is how bank wire transfers work, but it’s inefficient for humans so nobody does that. I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair. This is done once per user. You then verify signatures to “accept” payments.
      - yunohn 4y ago
        > memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned. I assume there should be an API to prefill this, making it easier for humans. Could literally just be the unique order ID or a hash thereof. > I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending Why would you need to ask? Isn’t there a captive payment portal API, like with popular wallets eg Metamask? > I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair. The problem is not in generation. Firstly, it pollutes the blockchain with single use addresses, though I guess maybe people don’t care. But AFAIK, the website would need to pay fees on a per-wallet-transaction basis when cashing out right? Payments need to pay fees anyway, but cashing out from a single wallet would be cheaper than this mess.
imtringued 4y ago
>Right now nobody is really interested in using Crypto for payment. I like to find real use cases and looking forward to buy real stuff with it, but most people just hodl, especially when markets are down. I saw Solana and thought, okay so it is possible to build a scalable cryptocurrency, but then again, the culture of speculation and excessive amounts of volatility make cryptocurrency useless for payments. The only promising cryptocurrency I have seen so far is the non pegged stablecoin RAI which is basically trying to emulate central banks via a smart contract that uses control theory to adjust a redemption rate which is effectively an interest rate that changes the unit of account rather than the quantity of money. Anyway, what this means is that cryptocurrency currency is still trapped in its degenerate gambling culture and we are at least a decade away from seeing real innovation in the cryptocurrency space beyond the usual tulip mania.
- m00dy 4y ago
  I'm not sure why people are not talking about BUSD. It is arguably safest and fastest stable coin. a stable coin gets its audit in US.
- rvz 4y ago
  > I saw Solana and thought, okay so it is possible to build a scalable cryptocurrency, but then again, the culture of speculation and excessive amounts of volatility make cryptocurrency useless for payments. Solana, Stellar and Algorand makes it usable and possible for scalable crypto payments with USDC. I just tried it, swapped it and it works well.
Grimburger 4y ago
> You can purchase fake items in this test shop with testnet coins of Solana and Stellar. > Please let me know what you think of it. Literally not a single point of contact anywhere to be found anywhere on the site. I guess you mean here instead? Also your login error message is just a db response :)
- ben165 4y ago
  Sorry, just use the top "index" link to the main blog website. At the bottom you find the imprint and my contact details. I'm going to look into the error need probably to catch it.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    Imprint wasn't a html link when I accessed the site, it was actually just a confusing bit of text down the bottom of the page. I did click through to index previously. Did you update it?
    - ben165 4y ago
      Yes, I inserted the imprint in both projects after you told me it's somehow hard to find.
TekMol 4y ago
Let me know if I am wrong about using crypto for payments: My understanding is that a big, maybe the biggest, obstacle is taxes. In countries like the USA and Germany, the way I understand tax law is: When you buy something with crypto, that counts as a sale of an asset. So you have to document what the fair value of the coffee you bought is at that point in time, subtract what you paid for the crypto you used and then pay taxes on the difference. This makes it more or less impossible to use crypto for payments, right? Every coffee you buy would have to be documented and evaluated and be part of your tax declaration.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Your understanding is correct, at least for the US.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  People ended up using crypto as a stock investment instead of as a currency and then they're surprised it gets taxed as a stock investment.
  - quelltext 4y ago
    I mean, it's currency. Trading currency is pretty old, so I doubt anyone was surprised here.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Your typical currency is inflationary though, which unlike crypto generally makes it a bad long term investment.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        Plenty of crypto tokens are inflationary. Some are deflationary. Some are both, based on supply and demand.
        4y ago
TimJRobinson 4y ago
If I was building a crypto payment system now I'd go with metamask / wallet connect. These work with all EVM compatible chains and most people want to pay with USD stablecoins than with a cryptocurrencies anyway.
- ben165 4y ago
  This would be a web3 solution. Most of the people are far away of using a wallet extension. I looked into it, the programming is much more challenging.
dnpp123 4y ago
Surprised nobody mentioned https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/ yet.
z9znz 4y ago
The real difficulties in providing crypto payment options is that users are generally not educated enough to use it properly. I built Bitcoin and Stellar payment systems for a client. In both cases, I generated an address for each customer and associated that address with the customer ID. By not reusing addresses, I never had the problem of not knowing who had paid and who had not. You cannot trust most people to provide a memo correctly. Of course, I generated a QR code for each payment request, so mobile users had no trouble. However, desktop users had to copy paste, and some people have trouble with even basic computer tasks... The biggest challenge was having people under-pay. Depending on the wallet a person used, the wallet might show them a fiat currency amount instead of a crypto amount. If I said to pay 100 XLM, they might put that into their wallet and see an incorrect (or inaccurate) conversion and adjust the number down (or up, but that rarely happened). I gave a locked in quote price when the order was placed, and I would let that price stay fixed until the order was paid. That was better than updating the to-pay amount after the order was placed, since the user might have been busy going off to buy or transfer the exact amount. We noted that if the conversion rate fluctuated greatly, the user could simply cancel the order and re-place it to get the current rate. Another problem was that people would pay directly from an exchange "wallet", and the exchange might take a fee out for the transfer. So that 100 we requested might arrive as 90. I did allow up to 3% under-pay, but in cases where the difference was greater I had to leave the order open as partially paid (and request the buyer pay the missing difference). Then we found that if that difference was small, some people couldn't transfer that small amount from their exchanges (there were often minimum transfer limits). Then on the company side, we've got crypto that we had to decide whether to sit on or convert to fiat. Obviously if the crypto market is on a bull run, it's beneficial to keep the money in crypto. But it's really a gamble (obviously a losing gamble in the last 10 months). So normally we would convert the crypto back to fiat every couple of days. The technical aspects of all this were not really difficult, and it was nice being in charge of refund decisions (unlike when taking credit cards or paypal where a bad actor can cause immediate and long term problems for the merchant).
- ben165 4y ago
  Thanks for the insights. Two questions 1) Bitcoin needs time to transfer. How did you approve the transaction? Instantly in hoping it will go through or had the costumer to wait? 2) The problem with new Stellar addresses is, that they need to be "funded". Your sending wallet has to recognize if this address is empty to run the right function (it's not a normal transaction). Most of the wallets can't do that. They wouldn't be able to transfer any funds. Have you had problems with that?
zeroclip 4y ago
This is a weird and brittle way to support crypto payments. What should instead be done is: 1. Accept stablecoin tokens like USDC. People do not want to buy a pizza and one year later be told they could have bought a house with that same set of tokens. 2. Use smart contracts, cryptographic proofs and digital signature algorithms instead of trying to match up balances and spends in the ledger. Example: Merchant has a product on their site with ID 1234. User purchases it for 5 USDC. If this has infinite stock, like a Bandcamp MP3, VPN subscription, production-on-demand, the user can bypass the paywall and request access to the product by writing a signed message with their wallet proving their purchase. If this has finite stock like a vintage clothing item or unique artwork, a smart contract can tally stock of ID 1234: decrement its quantity on each successful purchase, and increment the user’s balance of that item. Proof of payment is the same: user can just sign a message at any point proving they own X amount of the product.
71a54xd 4y ago
In my experience, NowPayments.io is at least a year ahead of everyone in the space of crypto payments integrations. They've effectively cloned stripe products to accept crypto and their support is also top tier.

21 points by ben165 4y ago

The biggest error is to assume people want to pay with cryptocurrency. They just want to speculate on it; first buy, then sell. Nobody actually pays with cryptocurrency. edit: ahh it’s in the actual article. Never mind.

herbst 4y ago
To be fair that assumption is wrong if you look at more weird specific niches. Crypto payments definitely have a place, also outside of drug markets.
- knorker 4y ago
  Like what?
  - herbst 4y ago
    Porn, SMM, basically any international digital services on the PayPal blacklist.
    - knorker 4y ago
      Porn: I'm not up to speed on the cryptocurrency use in porn. Shouldn't this run into consumer protection issues? That is: while it and debit cards don't guarantee as simple a chargeback as a credit card, there are still laws here. So let's say pornhub takes bitcoin (can't check, as I'm in a public place). It still needs a refunds and frauds department for those payments, no? And pornhub does take credit cards. Yes, the fees are higher. But largely because the chargebacks are more common (spouse finds out, buyer feigns ignorance). What's SSM in this context?
      - herbst 4y ago
        Smm = Social media marketing, buying likes and that stuff. It's a huge market actually. Porn sites also heavily set on crypto to pay their creators, paying out is even more an issue than charging in such markets. I don't understand where the issue with refunding crypto should be. It's also way cheaper than what stripe, PayPal or co charges if users issue refunds. Personally I only save money by using crypto, I save thousands of dollars in transaction and chargeback fees every year. For me as merchants it's a non brainer. I also use crypto as a customer but I usually trust these companies before I send money. The swiss Amazon is accepting crypto for example, as customer I trust them and all customer protections laws apply as well.
        knorker 4y ago
        > I save thousands of dollars in transaction and chargeback fees every year Honest question: Have you run that past a lawyer? Chargebacks are partially based in law, so while you could be saving money now, it could be by building up more and more legal liability and risk. But maybe you'll be fine, because you refund any and all refund requests.
TekMol 4y ago
I would love to pay with crypto. Every time I type my credit card number into some web form I think "Damn, I hope the number will not end up in some shady hands causing me trouble". I had my credit card disabled once because someone started using it to buy stuff with it around the world. What a freaking hassle. Telephone calls, letters, several days without a CC, had to change the number everywhere .. annoying. Paying a lightning invoice does not bear such risks.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  You know that lots of card providers can generate virtual cards for free on demand these days right? Another set of details that works the same as your original card but can be used for, say, just one site and cancelled at any time if it gets misused. If that's your only gripe than that's probably the easier way than switching to an entirely separate financial system.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    It is not realistic to generate a virtual card for each purchase. It creates a documentation headache as well, such as handling returns and payment proofs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - verdverm 4y ago
      I expect credit cards to become more like private keys in time, managed by the company, and transactions will have unique tokens so that your real number is never passed to the vendor. Blockchain like ideas will be implemented in "TradFi" without the overhead of blockchain.
- desindol 4y ago
  You are saying that you rather would have your crypto wallet stolen instead of your credit card?
0x64 4y ago
How come? There's no speculation in stablecoins, USD-following or not. Especially if you transact on a layer-2 solution, it's quite convenient.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  That couldn't be further than the truth. It's just a more convenient way of trading forex.

sentrms 4y ago

As a crypto enthusiast I looked into what it would take to accept ADA payments on my membership site without relying on a payment provider. I was surprised by the quality of the documentation and realized it was quite feasible to implement. I decided against it as the sentiment around crypto (even a proof of stake chain like Cardano) would probably have a negative net result on customer acquisition and retention. It would have been a fun endeavour with a potential poor outcome.

ben165 4y ago
Yes, that's a big problem. You might harm your reputation including a Crypto payment option.
- pvinis 4y ago
  There are people, myself included, that appreciate a crypto payment inclusion. I am proud to say I have used crypto to buy a physical souvenir, a steam game, and a yearly subscription to a service. I would gladly do that more if they allow me.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Just out of curiosity. What is the fraction of these transactions in crypto compared to those with other payment methods?
    - pvinis 4y ago
      Compared to my other transactions? Very small. The best "comparison" I can make is this: - I buy random shit online every now and then, also from Amazon. That one souvenir I got for me and a friend was about 40 dollars worth, and I paid with crypto that time. - I buy steam games maybe one every 3 months? So buying that one game with crypto is a small percentage, yes, but also probably the next game I'll get will also be with crypto payment, so it will increase the percentage slowly? - For the service, I have paid maybe 15 dollars for similar services in my life. That one that accepts crypto is also the best one I have found yet, and to that I have paid about 80 dollars so far. So for that, the percentage is up there, and I'll continue paying them that way!

yunohn 4y ago

Maybe I misunderstand the author’s goal, but using the “random number” from the payment amount and regularly checking wallet balance, just seem incredibly rudimentary compared to an actual payments system…

FabHK 4y ago
Yes. And using a "unique" number between 0 and 99 gives you an indication of how many transactions this system is designed to support. (Not many, it seems to me.)
NavinF 4y ago
Yeah normally you’d create a new address to receive payments from each user. Addresses are essentially free so this is how everyone else figures out which user deposited money into their cryptocurrency wallet.
- yunohn 4y ago
  That also seems like an inefficient way to handle transactions. This is honestly surprisingly, I always assumed crypto had better payment solutions! After all, that’s what they all proclaim to be - not speculative gambling or scamming.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Ehh I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending from or use the memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned. The latter is how bank wire transfers work, but it’s inefficient for humans so nobody does that. I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair. This is done once per user. You then verify signatures to “accept” payments.
    - yunohn 4y ago
      > memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned. I assume there should be an API to prefill this, making it easier for humans. Could literally just be the unique order ID or a hash thereof. > I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending Why would you need to ask? Isn’t there a captive payment portal API, like with popular wallets eg Metamask? > I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair. The problem is not in generation. Firstly, it pollutes the blockchain with single use addresses, though I guess maybe people don’t care. But AFAIK, the website would need to pay fees on a per-wallet-transaction basis when cashing out right? Payments need to pay fees anyway, but cashing out from a single wallet would be cheaper than this mess.

imtringued 4y ago

>Right now nobody is really interested in using Crypto for payment. I like to find real use cases and looking forward to buy real stuff with it, but most people just hodl, especially when markets are down. I saw Solana and thought, okay so it is possible to build a scalable cryptocurrency, but then again, the culture of speculation and excessive amounts of volatility make cryptocurrency useless for payments. The only promising cryptocurrency I have seen so far is the non pegged stablecoin RAI which is basically trying to emulate central banks via a smart contract that uses control theory to adjust a redemption rate which is effectively an interest rate that changes the unit of account rather than the quantity of money. Anyway, what this means is that cryptocurrency currency is still trapped in its degenerate gambling culture and we are at least a decade away from seeing real innovation in the cryptocurrency space beyond the usual tulip mania.

m00dy 4y ago
I'm not sure why people are not talking about BUSD. It is arguably safest and fastest stable coin. a stable coin gets its audit in US.
rvz 4y ago
> I saw Solana and thought, okay so it is possible to build a scalable cryptocurrency, but then again, the culture of speculation and excessive amounts of volatility make cryptocurrency useless for payments. Solana, Stellar and Algorand makes it usable and possible for scalable crypto payments with USDC. I just tried it, swapped it and it works well.

Grimburger 4y ago

> You can purchase fake items in this test shop with testnet coins of Solana and Stellar. > Please let me know what you think of it. Literally not a single point of contact anywhere to be found anywhere on the site. I guess you mean here instead? Also your login error message is just a db response :)

ben165 4y ago
Sorry, just use the top "index" link to the main blog website. At the bottom you find the imprint and my contact details. I'm going to look into the error need probably to catch it.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  Imprint wasn't a html link when I accessed the site, it was actually just a confusing bit of text down the bottom of the page. I did click through to index previously. Did you update it?
  - ben165 4y ago
    Yes, I inserted the imprint in both projects after you told me it's somehow hard to find.

TekMol 4y ago

Let me know if I am wrong about using crypto for payments: My understanding is that a big, maybe the biggest, obstacle is taxes. In countries like the USA and Germany, the way I understand tax law is: When you buy something with crypto, that counts as a sale of an asset. So you have to document what the fair value of the coffee you bought is at that point in time, subtract what you paid for the crypto you used and then pay taxes on the difference. This makes it more or less impossible to use crypto for payments, right? Every coffee you buy would have to be documented and evaluated and be part of your tax declaration.

woodruffw 4y ago
Your understanding is correct, at least for the US.
moffkalast 4y ago
People ended up using crypto as a stock investment instead of as a currency and then they're surprised it gets taxed as a stock investment.
- quelltext 4y ago
  I mean, it's currency. Trading currency is pretty old, so I doubt anyone was surprised here.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Your typical currency is inflationary though, which unlike crypto generally makes it a bad long term investment.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Plenty of crypto tokens are inflationary. Some are deflationary. Some are both, based on supply and demand.
      - 4y ago

TimJRobinson 4y ago

If I was building a crypto payment system now I'd go with metamask / wallet connect. These work with all EVM compatible chains and most people want to pay with USD stablecoins than with a cryptocurrencies anyway.

ben165 4y ago
This would be a web3 solution. Most of the people are far away of using a wallet extension. I looked into it, the programming is much more challenging.

dnpp123 4y ago

Surprised nobody mentioned https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/ yet.

z9znz 4y ago

The real difficulties in providing crypto payment options is that users are generally not educated enough to use it properly. I built Bitcoin and Stellar payment systems for a client. In both cases, I generated an address for each customer and associated that address with the customer ID. By not reusing addresses, I never had the problem of not knowing who had paid and who had not. You cannot trust most people to provide a memo correctly. Of course, I generated a QR code for each payment request, so mobile users had no trouble. However, desktop users had to copy paste, and some people have trouble with even basic computer tasks... The biggest challenge was having people under-pay. Depending on the wallet a person used, the wallet might show them a fiat currency amount instead of a crypto amount. If I said to pay 100 XLM, they might put that into their wallet and see an incorrect (or inaccurate) conversion and adjust the number down (or up, but that rarely happened). I gave a locked in quote price when the order was placed, and I would let that price stay fixed until the order was paid. That was better than updating the to-pay amount after the order was placed, since the user might have been busy going off to buy or transfer the exact amount. We noted that if the conversion rate fluctuated greatly, the user could simply cancel the order and re-place it to get the current rate. Another problem was that people would pay directly from an exchange "wallet", and the exchange might take a fee out for the transfer. So that 100 we requested might arrive as 90. I did allow up to 3% under-pay, but in cases where the difference was greater I had to leave the order open as partially paid (and request the buyer pay the missing difference). Then we found that if that difference was small, some people couldn't transfer that small amount from their exchanges (there were often minimum transfer limits). Then on the company side, we've got crypto that we had to decide whether to sit on or convert to fiat. Obviously if the crypto market is on a bull run, it's beneficial to keep the money in crypto. But it's really a gamble (obviously a losing gamble in the last 10 months). So normally we would convert the crypto back to fiat every couple of days. The technical aspects of all this were not really difficult, and it was nice being in charge of refund decisions (unlike when taking credit cards or paypal where a bad actor can cause immediate and long term problems for the merchant).

ben165 4y ago
Thanks for the insights. Two questions 1) Bitcoin needs time to transfer. How did you approve the transaction? Instantly in hoping it will go through or had the costumer to wait? 2) The problem with new Stellar addresses is, that they need to be "funded". Your sending wallet has to recognize if this address is empty to run the right function (it's not a normal transaction). Most of the wallets can't do that. They wouldn't be able to transfer any funds. Have you had problems with that?

zeroclip 4y ago

This is a weird and brittle way to support crypto payments. What should instead be done is: 1. Accept stablecoin tokens like USDC. People do not want to buy a pizza and one year later be told they could have bought a house with that same set of tokens. 2. Use smart contracts, cryptographic proofs and digital signature algorithms instead of trying to match up balances and spends in the ledger. Example: Merchant has a product on their site with ID 1234. User purchases it for 5 USDC. If this has infinite stock, like a Bandcamp MP3, VPN subscription, production-on-demand, the user can bypass the paywall and request access to the product by writing a signed message with their wallet proving their purchase. If this has finite stock like a vintage clothing item or unique artwork, a smart contract can tally stock of ID 1234: decrement its quantity on each successful purchase, and increment the user’s balance of that item. Proof of payment is the same: user can just sign a message at any point proving they own X amount of the product.

71a54xd 4y ago

In my experience, NowPayments.io is at least a year ahead of everyone in the space of crypto payments integrations. They've effectively cloned stripe products to accept crypto and their support is also top tier.