19 ms·

PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments

122 points by Aqueous 12y ago

ycombinatoracc 12y ago
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- viraptor 12y ago
  I don't think bitcoin won yet. I haven't heard of paypal allowing people to pay for bitcoins yet. (as in transfers of funds to exchanges) They accept it for their service, but noone else can.
  - pera 12y ago
    Maybe not Bitcoin, but at this point I can already say that cryptocurrencies are the future of the global economy.
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "at this point I can already say that cryptocurrencies are the future of the global economy" You can say it all you want - that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Personally I see cryptocurrencies becoming popular enough that 'normal' people use them from time to time and understand how they work but I don't see the entire global economy switching from current currency forms to cryptocurrency anytime in the near future.
      - natrius 12y ago
        Merchants are paying 3% or so to accept money from their customers today. There are zero-fee, instant conversions for customers and merchants to use Bitcoin (Circle and BitPay, respectively). Once the user experience is right, customers will pay using funds from their bank account via Bitcoin with near-zero costs (slight exchange rate differences between services), and merchants will offer their customers discounts to pay that way. Two years from now, merchants won't be paying 3%.
        dangerlibrary 12y ago
        The only place I get a discount for paying in cash is gas stations. Merchants just charge everyone a little more, and nobody cares.
        lmartel 12y ago
        There will always be intermediaries taking a few percent--from the consumer's point of view, bitcoin's incompatibility with chargebacks is a bug, not a feature.
        githulhu 12y ago
        Bitcoin transactions won't always be free though, as the block reward decreases and transaction fees become necessary to incent the network to verify transactions. The fees for bitcoin may end up being roughly the same as traditional banking fees.
        natrius 12y ago
        We'll see. In the near term, merchants can accept Bitcoin for 0%. Customers can send Bitcoin for five cents, and some wallets pay that for you.
        rstupek 12y ago
        We'll see? There is no refuting argument in there. Please provide an example of how you expect bitcoin to remain "free" going forward based on arguments already providing showing how it can't be free.
        natrius 12y ago
        I never said anything would be free forever. I said "we'll see" in reference to credit card-like fees.
        seiji 12y ago
        In the US, only poor people spend cash. Everybody else spends credit and reconciles at the end of the month (or lets it roll over).
      - jerguismi 12y ago
        Wait until hyperinflation kicks in.
  - clamprecht 12y ago
    Using PayPal is a really bad way to sell bitcoins, because PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment. If you sell bitcoins via PayPal, you're taking a big counterparty risk (not to mention the 3rd party, PayPal itself).
    - ewoodrich 12y ago
      > PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment. What would be the alternative? CC, ACH, and most other payment systems also have a mechanism for chargebacks.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - tracker1 12y ago
        Small claims court. Seriously, this is precisely the kind of thing common law and the court system is for. Just the same as your recourse with cash. As for international trade, buyer beware.
    - vivab0rg 12y ago
      I'm from Argentina and have 30+ transactions and 100% positive feedback BUYING bitcoins with my PayPal funds on Localbitcoins. Never disputed any transaction and usually send +4% ~ +6% to help the seller with the PayPal fees (plus, I my rates al always better than Bitstamp's). Edit: My Localbitcoins user is vivab0rg if you'd like to check.
      - clamprecht 12y ago
        I live in Buenos Aires (Palermo) and have bitcoins to sell for pesos. Please contact me if interested, and if you live in CABA.
  - c0ldfusi0nz 12y ago
    I'd say we're still somewhere in the ignore -> laugh stage.
    - jnbiche 12y ago
      Keep telling yourself that as we change the world.
- atmosx 12y ago
  BTC becoming an official currency and time travel are the two things I'm not expecting to see in my lifespan :-)
dangerlibrary 12y ago
Serious question: If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin? With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time. Maybe there is some opportunity for arbitrage in currency conversion rates, because of the low daily trading volume? But that doesn't seem like a likely profitable investment when you can lose 4% of your value at 3am because of a cascading margin call on a single exchange. Other than currency speculation and the ease of evading the law, why would anyone want to exchange a reasonably stable national currency for bitcoin?
- ewoodrich 12y ago
  I'd imagine the greatest benefit would be as a low friction P2P payment option. It's still hard to just send a fixed amount of money to someone with traditional payment systems, and if both parties have and use BTC, it would be pretty convenient.
  - dangerlibrary 12y ago
    > a fixed amount of money That's still tricky with bitcoin, though, no? You can certainly send a fixed amount of BTC, but that value is probably going to get pegged to a national currency when you want to spend it.
    - ewoodrich 12y ago
      True, which is part of the reason I've held off on buying any (price volatility still concerns me). In theory though, it is a superior payment transfer method between individuals, compared with the current system. But it has a lot of drawbacks right now, as well.
  - tzs 12y ago
    > It's still hard to just send a fixed amount of money to someone with traditional payment systems [...] How about Venmo? That looks pretty easy.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
johnyzee 12y ago
Coinbase business development is kicking ass and taking names.
- Mahn 12y ago
  They'll end up bought by a big name company if Bitcoin continues to grow, I'm sure.
blueking 12y ago
Bitcoin was created to get rid of the likes of Paypal.
- innguest 12y ago
  Then help me make sense of why Paypal is partnering with Coinbase (straight question).
  - blueking 12y ago
    Because they know once bitcoin starts getting accepted nobody is going to put up with their ridiculous system of rules or give them a cut out of every transaction. And its tax free too. They just became irrelevant. Makes me wish I believed in a deity so I could give thanks :) Holy shit Paypal were a awful service. Customer service was like a colonoscopy. Ferreting out information with that suspicious tone. A million arbitrary limits and hoops to jump though. They got away with that because they were the only game in town. Not anymore. They are looking for a life raft. Thats what coinbase move is about... appeasing their shareholders. But heres the thing about coinbase.... nobody needs them either.
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  Was it? As in, do you have some empirical basis for that statement -- as in, you know, something related to actual statements made by the creator(s) of the original bitcoin protocol itself? Or is it just something you find nifty to believe in (therefore it must be true)? Please clarify.
  - blueking 12y ago
    LMAO. Of course it was. I'm not answering your snotty questions. Google it. :)
  - Mahn 12y ago
    The original creator(s) just envisioned money designed to work in a digital medium. From there people derive that if Bitcoin is money for the internet it can replace PayPal, though in practice is more complex than that. The reality is that as it stands now, Bitcoin is hard to understand and properly use, so even though it can be used as-is if you know well what you are doing and are careful, for Bitcoin to be usable for the vast majority of people a layer on top that makes it more consumer friendly is most likely necessary. Thus Bitcoin itself probably won't replace PayPal on its own, but a service that "consumerizes" it like Coinbase or Circle might, if Bitcoin were to become massive.
sassypants 12y ago
Bitcoin remains the best and most liquid savings vehicle over the last five years of its existence. Assuming savings = holding currency for over 1 year. On 98% of the days that you could have purchased Bitcoin you would have realized an increase in purchasing power in a year's time. In those 2% of cases where you could have purchased Bitcoin and seen a loss over one year, you would have still seen an increase in purchasing power in another 300 days. (This is mostly dealing with the June 2011 bubble) There has never been a time where you could hold Bitcoin for 2 years and lose purchasing power. On the contrary, holding Bitcoin brings on average a 5x per year return in purchasing power. Past performance, future gains, blah blah. Judgement is about taking into consideration the facts we have now and comparing them against past performance. There are very good reasons why Bitcoin is valued around $6billion now and very good reasons to think it will be valued higher in the future. You should be placing your life savings in Bitcoin, and only purchasing the USD that you require and holding it for as short of a period as possible. This would have been the best strategy for 98% of 1 year periods over the last five years, and 100% of 2 year periods over the last 5 years. Debit cards that draw on Bitcoin balances and allow you to use the VISA and Mastercard networks should be the most interesting products -- because they allow you to expose yourself to the dollar's periodic collapse against Bitcoin for the shortest period of time. I'm sure I'll be downvoted and that people will tell you that Bitcoin is super risky and that you should only invest what you can afford to lose -- but shouldn't that be the case for the dollar and not Bitcoin? The dollar loses 90% of its purchasing power against Bitcoin on semi-regular schedules, and people keep purchasing more after each collapse. This routine should get old after a while, but that's what happens when you don't use Bitcoin as your unit of account!
- bdcravens 12y ago
  You're using a time-span that's a full 20% of the item's lifespan. Anyone with a single college level statistics class wouldn't be able to keep a straight face reading this. over the last five years of its existence The first exchange didn't come online until summer of 2010. What's the 1 year picture like for everyone who had coins in Mt. Gox?
  - sassypants 12y ago
cvburgess 12y ago
The official Braintree post on the one-touch side of things is super interesting and vague[1] - does anyone know what the UX is like from a developers point of view? [1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch
- benmills 12y ago
  Hey I work at Braintree on our SDKs. You can find the list of things you need to do to enable one touch here[1]. For Android there is nothing outside a normal Braintree integration you need to do and for iOS you need to register a URL type as well as make two changes in your app delegate to tell us about it. We generally think about two ways you can integrate with Braintree on the front-end: the drop-in UI and custom. Drop-in [2] means you yield control to us, but you get a dead simple integration which includes one touch paypal and venmo out of the box. If you go the custom[3] route it's obviously more work to integrate, but adding one touch only requires some button that starts the paypal or venmo flow. Edit: You can also download ParkWhiz (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book-parking/id595743376?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book-parking/i...) and install the PayPal app to see the user experience for yourself! [1] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one-touch#enabling-one-touch https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one-touc... [2] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop-in https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop... [3] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/paypal-and-venmo https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/payp...
  - cvburgess 12y ago
    Thanks for the links! The UI looks clean enough, I wonder how many users will chose to use paypal/venmo over adding a cc...

122 points by Aqueous 12y ago

ycombinatoracc 12y ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

viraptor 12y ago
I don't think bitcoin won yet. I haven't heard of paypal allowing people to pay for bitcoins yet. (as in transfers of funds to exchanges) They accept it for their service, but noone else can.
- pera 12y ago
  Maybe not Bitcoin, but at this point I can already say that cryptocurrencies are the future of the global economy.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "at this point I can already say that cryptocurrencies are the future of the global economy" You can say it all you want - that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Personally I see cryptocurrencies becoming popular enough that 'normal' people use them from time to time and understand how they work but I don't see the entire global economy switching from current currency forms to cryptocurrency anytime in the near future.
    - natrius 12y ago
      Merchants are paying 3% or so to accept money from their customers today. There are zero-fee, instant conversions for customers and merchants to use Bitcoin (Circle and BitPay, respectively). Once the user experience is right, customers will pay using funds from their bank account via Bitcoin with near-zero costs (slight exchange rate differences between services), and merchants will offer their customers discounts to pay that way. Two years from now, merchants won't be paying 3%.
      - dangerlibrary 12y ago
        The only place I get a discount for paying in cash is gas stations. Merchants just charge everyone a little more, and nobody cares.
      - lmartel 12y ago
        There will always be intermediaries taking a few percent--from the consumer's point of view, bitcoin's incompatibility with chargebacks is a bug, not a feature.
      - githulhu 12y ago
        Bitcoin transactions won't always be free though, as the block reward decreases and transaction fees become necessary to incent the network to verify transactions. The fees for bitcoin may end up being roughly the same as traditional banking fees.
        natrius 12y ago
        We'll see. In the near term, merchants can accept Bitcoin for 0%. Customers can send Bitcoin for five cents, and some wallets pay that for you.
        rstupek 12y ago
        We'll see? There is no refuting argument in there. Please provide an example of how you expect bitcoin to remain "free" going forward based on arguments already providing showing how it can't be free.
        natrius 12y ago
        I never said anything would be free forever. I said "we'll see" in reference to credit card-like fees.
      - seiji 12y ago
        In the US, only poor people spend cash. Everybody else spends credit and reconciles at the end of the month (or lets it roll over).
    - jerguismi 12y ago
      Wait until hyperinflation kicks in.
- clamprecht 12y ago
  Using PayPal is a really bad way to sell bitcoins, because PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment. If you sell bitcoins via PayPal, you're taking a big counterparty risk (not to mention the 3rd party, PayPal itself).
  - ewoodrich 12y ago
    > PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment. What would be the alternative? CC, ACH, and most other payment systems also have a mechanism for chargebacks.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - tracker1 12y ago
      Small claims court. Seriously, this is precisely the kind of thing common law and the court system is for. Just the same as your recourse with cash. As for international trade, buyer beware.
  - vivab0rg 12y ago
    I'm from Argentina and have 30+ transactions and 100% positive feedback BUYING bitcoins with my PayPal funds on Localbitcoins. Never disputed any transaction and usually send +4% ~ +6% to help the seller with the PayPal fees (plus, I my rates al always better than Bitstamp's). Edit: My Localbitcoins user is vivab0rg if you'd like to check.
    - clamprecht 12y ago
      I live in Buenos Aires (Palermo) and have bitcoins to sell for pesos. Please contact me if interested, and if you live in CABA.
- c0ldfusi0nz 12y ago
  I'd say we're still somewhere in the ignore -> laugh stage.
  - jnbiche 12y ago
    Keep telling yourself that as we change the world.
atmosx 12y ago
BTC becoming an official currency and time travel are the two things I'm not expecting to see in my lifespan :-)

dangerlibrary 12y ago

Serious question: If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin? With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time. Maybe there is some opportunity for arbitrage in currency conversion rates, because of the low daily trading volume? But that doesn't seem like a likely profitable investment when you can lose 4% of your value at 3am because of a cascading margin call on a single exchange. Other than currency speculation and the ease of evading the law, why would anyone want to exchange a reasonably stable national currency for bitcoin?

ewoodrich 12y ago
I'd imagine the greatest benefit would be as a low friction P2P payment option. It's still hard to just send a fixed amount of money to someone with traditional payment systems, and if both parties have and use BTC, it would be pretty convenient.
- dangerlibrary 12y ago
  > a fixed amount of money That's still tricky with bitcoin, though, no? You can certainly send a fixed amount of BTC, but that value is probably going to get pegged to a national currency when you want to spend it.
  - ewoodrich 12y ago
    True, which is part of the reason I've held off on buying any (price volatility still concerns me). In theory though, it is a superior payment transfer method between individuals, compared with the current system. But it has a lot of drawbacks right now, as well.
- tzs 12y ago
  > It's still hard to just send a fixed amount of money to someone with traditional payment systems [...] How about Venmo? That looks pretty easy.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

johnyzee 12y ago

Coinbase business development is kicking ass and taking names.

Mahn 12y ago
They'll end up bought by a big name company if Bitcoin continues to grow, I'm sure.

blueking 12y ago

Bitcoin was created to get rid of the likes of Paypal.

innguest 12y ago
Then help me make sense of why Paypal is partnering with Coinbase (straight question).
- blueking 12y ago
  Because they know once bitcoin starts getting accepted nobody is going to put up with their ridiculous system of rules or give them a cut out of every transaction. And its tax free too. They just became irrelevant. Makes me wish I believed in a deity so I could give thanks :) Holy shit Paypal were a awful service. Customer service was like a colonoscopy. Ferreting out information with that suspicious tone. A million arbitrary limits and hoops to jump though. They got away with that because they were the only game in town. Not anymore. They are looking for a life raft. Thats what coinbase move is about... appeasing their shareholders. But heres the thing about coinbase.... nobody needs them either.
dreamweapon 12y ago
Was it? As in, do you have some empirical basis for that statement -- as in, you know, something related to actual statements made by the creator(s) of the original bitcoin protocol itself? Or is it just something you find nifty to believe in (therefore it must be true)? Please clarify.
- blueking 12y ago
  LMAO. Of course it was. I'm not answering your snotty questions. Google it. :)
- Mahn 12y ago
  The original creator(s) just envisioned money designed to work in a digital medium. From there people derive that if Bitcoin is money for the internet it can replace PayPal, though in practice is more complex than that. The reality is that as it stands now, Bitcoin is hard to understand and properly use, so even though it can be used as-is if you know well what you are doing and are careful, for Bitcoin to be usable for the vast majority of people a layer on top that makes it more consumer friendly is most likely necessary. Thus Bitcoin itself probably won't replace PayPal on its own, but a service that "consumerizes" it like Coinbase or Circle might, if Bitcoin were to become massive.

sassypants 12y ago

Bitcoin remains the best and most liquid savings vehicle over the last five years of its existence. Assuming savings = holding currency for over 1 year. On 98% of the days that you could have purchased Bitcoin you would have realized an increase in purchasing power in a year's time. In those 2% of cases where you could have purchased Bitcoin and seen a loss over one year, you would have still seen an increase in purchasing power in another 300 days. (This is mostly dealing with the June 2011 bubble) There has never been a time where you could hold Bitcoin for 2 years and lose purchasing power. On the contrary, holding Bitcoin brings on average a 5x per year return in purchasing power. Past performance, future gains, blah blah. Judgement is about taking into consideration the facts we have now and comparing them against past performance. There are very good reasons why Bitcoin is valued around $6billion now and very good reasons to think it will be valued higher in the future. You should be placing your life savings in Bitcoin, and only purchasing the USD that you require and holding it for as short of a period as possible. This would have been the best strategy for 98% of 1 year periods over the last five years, and 100% of 2 year periods over the last 5 years. Debit cards that draw on Bitcoin balances and allow you to use the VISA and Mastercard networks should be the most interesting products -- because they allow you to expose yourself to the dollar's periodic collapse against Bitcoin for the shortest period of time. I'm sure I'll be downvoted and that people will tell you that Bitcoin is super risky and that you should only invest what you can afford to lose -- but shouldn't that be the case for the dollar and not Bitcoin? The dollar loses 90% of its purchasing power against Bitcoin on semi-regular schedules, and people keep purchasing more after each collapse. This routine should get old after a while, but that's what happens when you don't use Bitcoin as your unit of account!

bdcravens 12y ago
You're using a time-span that's a full 20% of the item's lifespan. Anyone with a single college level statistics class wouldn't be able to keep a straight face reading this. over the last five years of its existence The first exchange didn't come online until summer of 2010. What's the 1 year picture like for everyone who had coins in Mt. Gox?
- sassypants 12y ago

cvburgess 12y ago

The official Braintree post on the one-touch side of things is super interesting and vague[1] - does anyone know what the UX is like from a developers point of view? [1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch

benmills 12y ago
Hey I work at Braintree on our SDKs. You can find the list of things you need to do to enable one touch here[1]. For Android there is nothing outside a normal Braintree integration you need to do and for iOS you need to register a URL type as well as make two changes in your app delegate to tell us about it. We generally think about two ways you can integrate with Braintree on the front-end: the drop-in UI and custom. Drop-in [2] means you yield control to us, but you get a dead simple integration which includes one touch paypal and venmo out of the box. If you go the custom[3] route it's obviously more work to integrate, but adding one touch only requires some button that starts the paypal or venmo flow. Edit: You can also download ParkWhiz (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book-parking/id595743376?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book-parking/i...) and install the PayPal app to see the user experience for yourself! [1] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one-touch#enabling-one-touch https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one-touc... [2] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop-in https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop... [3] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/paypal-and-venmo https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/payp...
- cvburgess 12y ago
  Thanks for the links! The UI looks clean enough, I wonder how many users will chose to use paypal/venmo over adding a cc...