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Sorry Steve, I have a lot of respect for everything you're doing at Balanced, but wow.. everything about this is wrong. 1. "Merchants generally want USD, not B

Sorry Steve, I have a lot of respect for everything you're doing at Balanced, but wow.. everything about this is wrong. 1. "Merchants generally want USD, not BTC". Coinbase supports BTC -> USD. It's an exchange. You don't need to use their OAuth to convert BTC to USD. 2. "The UX is vastly superior to using a bare address". If you're using Bitcoin, you better know how to use an address. Not sure how that would be confusing to anyone using Bitcoin. Most sites use bare address + QR code. 3. "You can't mail a twenty dollar bill to most SaaS products". This is what Bitcoin solves! People are using Bitcoin to get away from the credit card paradigm. This is a broken implementation of "accepting BTC". You don't accept BTC, you accept Coinbase.

steveklabnik 13y ago
1. Yes, I understand Instant Exchange is separate. This is about how we wouldn't roll our own solution, _someone_ would be powering our Bitcoin integration. 2. Yes, as I said, if you know what's going on, it won't be weird to you. That said, cart abandonment is a big problem, as is keeping checkout pages as simple as possible. 3. Again, this is where we'll have to disagree. You say "people are using Bitcoin to get away from the credit card paradigm", but I say "people are not using Bitcoin because it's too far away from the credit card paradigm." If the Bitcoin community wants to grow outside of the fringe libertarian set, they'll need to understand people's needs more and their dreams less. I myself stayed away from BTC for years simply because of the rhetoric. People that aren't inherently interested in cryptocurrencies aren't going to use them unless they solve a problem they actually have.
- hendzen 13y ago
  Regarding raw addresses, I would encourage you to look into the payment protocol (BIP70). Once that is widespread (it is already implemented in some wallets), the average BTC user will never have to worry about raw addresses, without the downside of having to route everything through coinbase. As a plus, the UX is IMO, better than that of typing in a CC number.

steveklabnik 13y ago

1. Yes, I understand Instant Exchange is separate. This is about how we wouldn't roll our own solution, _someone_ would be powering our Bitcoin integration. 2. Yes, as I said, if you know what's going on, it won't be weird to you. That said, cart abandonment is a big problem, as is keeping checkout pages as simple as possible. 3. Again, this is where we'll have to disagree. You say "people are using Bitcoin to get away from the credit card paradigm", but I say "people are not using Bitcoin because it's too far away from the credit card paradigm." If the Bitcoin community wants to grow outside of the fringe libertarian set, they'll need to understand people's needs more and their dreams less. I myself stayed away from BTC for years simply because of the rhetoric. People that aren't inherently interested in cryptocurrencies aren't going to use them unless they solve a problem they actually have.

hendzen 13y ago
Regarding raw addresses, I would encourage you to look into the payment protocol (BIP70). Once that is widespread (it is already implemented in some wallets), the average BTC user will never have to worry about raw addresses, without the downside of having to route everything through coinbase. As a plus, the UX is IMO, better than that of typing in a CC number.