46 ms·

BitPay and PayPal

308 points by seansoutpost 12y ago

andrewljohnson 12y ago
BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  My instinct says it will be a spike that trends back down fairly soon, but my instinct about btc rates has frequently been wrong.
  - kolev 12y ago
    Weak spike. If this news doesn't break $450, we're gonna see $350 soon.
    - scottcanoni 12y ago
      Agreed, I would expect news like this to cause a much much bigger spike.
- bdcravens 12y ago
  Rocketed up to 450, dropped to 430 within minutes. Looking like it'll level out a little higher.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable. Examine the fundamentals before you jump into a gambler's market.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    What's the value proposition of money? Sending money to people. Bitcoin is silly in lots of ways, but what something like it could potentially do is revolutionary. PayPal is worth billions; retail banking is a 12-figure yearly revenue industry. That's a whole lot of money on the table.
    - drcode 12y ago
      Of course, the rub is Bitcoin is _already_ worth billions... Paypal is kind of a "small fish" by bitcoin standards (not that it isn't welcomed news)
  - joshuaxls 12y ago
    This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one company—say Western Union and international remittances. That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Heard that before. The question to answer is, "Why now?" What's different now? Nothing. Not yet. This will change someday, but I don't think that's today. The day Bitcoin gets FDIC protections is the day it can go mainstream.
      - joshuaxls 12y ago
        The point of bitcoin is that you don't need FDIC protection. You need FDIC protection with a bank because the bank isn't required to hold enough reserve to cover its deposits. If there's a run on the bank, and everyone wants to pull their deposits out, and the bank is insolvent, then the government guarantees to protect consumers by printing more money (inflation) to fulfill the bank's reserve requirements. With bitcoin, you either have it or you don't. You can run your own bank, as long as you know how to safely store a private key.
- jarek 12y ago
  > BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: For values of "rocketing" approaching "down 6% on the week, 13% on the month"
  - runeks 12y ago
    and ~250% on the year [1] :) [1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10z...
    - atmosx 12y ago
      How the year standings have anything to do with the news at hand is beyond me.
      - danbruc 12y ago
        It provides a bigger picture because the current situation is not representative at all. Admittedly everybody who cares about Bitcoin is aware of that but it may still be a valuable information for the random reader without much Bitcoin background.
  - javert 12y ago
    Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "on this news." Perhaps you do understand, but it makes you feel good to say something nasty about bitcoin. And that feeling is more important to you than honest discussion.
    - jarek 12y ago
      Is context undesirable in honest discussions about Bitcoin then?
      - lytedev 12y ago
        The given context was "on this news," explicitly referring to the single period of time since this information was made public. In that time and that time alone, bitcoin has come up a few dollars. Nobody is denying the fact that bitcoin is still down from last week - or even last month, but the context in question is the past 4ish hours.
Everhusk 12y ago
This is really big news for bitcoin, BTC-e is taking off.
canvia 12y ago
It wasn't just BitPay, also Coinbase and GoCoin: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/PayPal-and-Virtual-Currency/ba-p/828230 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/PayPal-an...
rcraft 12y ago
Is paypal just ignoring the IRS' recent guidelines that bitcoin is treated as property? From http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property-not-currency-in-tax-system-irs-says.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property...: Today’s IRS guidance will provide certainty for Bitcoin investors, along with income-tax liability that wasn’t specified before. Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross income for the coffee shop. “It’s challenging if you have to think about capital gains before you buy a cup of coffee,” he said.
- natrius 12y ago
  Merchants who use BitPay and Coinbase to accept Bitcoin usually choose to let those processors convert the funds to dollars on their behalf. Neither PayPal nor the merchants will typically touch Bitcoin during a transaction.
- embolalia 12y ago
  Not sure where you get that they're ignoring it. TFA says nothing of taxes, and that burden falls on the buyer anyway. Unless you're saying that the IRS's guidelines mean it can't be used to buy things for some reason, which is just not true at all.
  - rcraft 12y ago
    Ignoring in the sense that Paypal thinks its worth their time to facilitate consumer transactions based on bitcoin. As the bloomberg article states, if I have to factor in my my capital gains tax liability with each purchase of an ebook or mp3, then that is a royal pain and would lessen my desire to use bitcoin for everyday purchases. It seems to me that perhaps Paypal just see's the IRS guidelines as a non-factor for consumers who will largely just ignore the guidance similar to how consumers are technically supposed to pay state sales tax on online purchases.
- DMac87 12y ago
  My guess is that PayPal et al don't particularly care - the onus is on the bitcoin user (i.e. the consumer) to calculate capital gains, report to the IRS etc. Those consumers probably don't care - they'll wait to see how/if the IRS actually has a willingness/ability to enforce their own guidelines...
trevordev 12y ago
BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding to my emails. I will not use bitpay in the future.
- tonyhb 12y ago
  I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless. Regarding your AngelHack prize... the same thing happened to me. I'd be more skeptical of AngelHack than Bitpay, a well-funded global company, though: http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-angelhack-lawsuit-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-angelhack-lawsuit... It's not the first time I've heard of AngelHack not following through.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - DINKDINK 12y ago
      >Bitcoin addresses are intended to be single use, disposable keys rather a long term method of identification. A portion of Bitcoin's address design is intended to minimize publicity of EC public keys if at all possible. A potential work around is to just BitAuth with a HD wallet? Thereby negating any address-reuse issues. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...
    - martindale 12y ago
      You might be thinking of BitID, which tightly couples payment addresses to identity: https://github.com/bitid/bitid https://github.com/bitid/bitid – BitAuth does not use Bitcoin keypairs. We created BitAuth as a way to avoid coupling payments with identity, which is why the keypairs are independent and include a different prefix (0x02).
SuddsMcDuff 12y ago
Looks like winkdex.com has gone down under the load
- drcode 12y ago
  Nice catch- It'll be great to check Google trends in a few days.
highercenter 12y ago
More choices in how people create value, share it, buy, sell and trade it – that’s exactly what PayPal is all about,” said Scott Ellison, Senior Director, Strategy, PayPal. That's amazing! And me thinking PayPal was all about our money!
ssteinb 12y ago
Paypal is going to acquire the shit out of them. Calling it now.
- justin_l 12y ago
  That's all I can think of - Bitpay/Coinbase/Gocoin partnered with PayPal because PayPal offered to acquire one or all of them. Bitpay and Coinbase* offer only two advantages over PayPal - slightly cheaper transactions, and the ability to transact in Bitcoin. Due to the merchant account requirements of each you lose anonymous transactions, so for example Silk Road could never use one of these services. So it strikes me as extremely odd that these guys would be partnering with Paypal, basically giving away their advantage, if there wasn't something bigger in it for them down the road. * not sure about Gocoin as I haven't looked at its merchant account offering.
appleflaxen 12y ago
Nothing could make me less interested in BitPay. PayPal is just such a negative connotation in my mind that it turns me off of a business partner just to know they are collaborating.
jtwebman 12y ago
What do you guys think of Coinbase? Is it a good replacement for BitPay? Sorry I am new to this are but wanted to start accepting Bitcoins
earthmeLon 12y ago
Hmmmm... I thought that a large reason many people helped develop bitcoin and it's community was to thwart Paypal, its highly-politically-motivated nature, and others like it.

308 points by seansoutpost 12y ago

BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/

waterlesscloud 12y ago
My instinct says it will be a spike that trends back down fairly soon, but my instinct about btc rates has frequently been wrong.
- kolev 12y ago
  Weak spike. If this news doesn't break $450, we're gonna see $350 soon.
  - scottcanoni 12y ago
    Agreed, I would expect news like this to cause a much much bigger spike.
bdcravens 12y ago
Rocketed up to 450, dropped to 430 within minutes. Looking like it'll level out a little higher.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable. Examine the fundamentals before you jump into a gambler's market.
- scarmig 12y ago
  What's the value proposition of money? Sending money to people. Bitcoin is silly in lots of ways, but what something like it could potentially do is revolutionary. PayPal is worth billions; retail banking is a 12-figure yearly revenue industry. That's a whole lot of money on the table.
  - drcode 12y ago
    Of course, the rub is Bitcoin is _already_ worth billions... Paypal is kind of a "small fish" by bitcoin standards (not that it isn't welcomed news)
- joshuaxls 12y ago
  This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one company—say Western Union and international remittances. That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Heard that before. The question to answer is, "Why now?" What's different now? Nothing. Not yet. This will change someday, but I don't think that's today. The day Bitcoin gets FDIC protections is the day it can go mainstream.
    - joshuaxls 12y ago
      The point of bitcoin is that you don't need FDIC protection. You need FDIC protection with a bank because the bank isn't required to hold enough reserve to cover its deposits. If there's a run on the bank, and everyone wants to pull their deposits out, and the bank is insolvent, then the government guarantees to protect consumers by printing more money (inflation) to fulfill the bank's reserve requirements. With bitcoin, you either have it or you don't. You can run your own bank, as long as you know how to safely store a private key.
jarek 12y ago
> BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: For values of "rocketing" approaching "down 6% on the week, 13% on the month"
- runeks 12y ago
  and ~250% on the year [1] :) [1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10z...
  - atmosx 12y ago
    How the year standings have anything to do with the news at hand is beyond me.
    - danbruc 12y ago
      It provides a bigger picture because the current situation is not representative at all. Admittedly everybody who cares about Bitcoin is aware of that but it may still be a valuable information for the random reader without much Bitcoin background.
- javert 12y ago
  Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "on this news." Perhaps you do understand, but it makes you feel good to say something nasty about bitcoin. And that feeling is more important to you than honest discussion.
  - jarek 12y ago
    Is context undesirable in honest discussions about Bitcoin then?
    - lytedev 12y ago
      The given context was "on this news," explicitly referring to the single period of time since this information was made public. In that time and that time alone, bitcoin has come up a few dollars. Nobody is denying the fact that bitcoin is still down from last week - or even last month, but the context in question is the past 4ish hours.

Everhusk 12y ago

This is really big news for bitcoin, BTC-e is taking off.

canvia 12y ago

It wasn't just BitPay, also Coinbase and GoCoin: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/PayPal-and-Virtual-Currency/ba-p/828230 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/PayPal-an...

rcraft 12y ago

Is paypal just ignoring the IRS' recent guidelines that bitcoin is treated as property? From http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property-not-currency-in-tax-system-irs-says.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property...: Today’s IRS guidance will provide certainty for Bitcoin investors, along with income-tax liability that wasn’t specified before. Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross income for the coffee shop. “It’s challenging if you have to think about capital gains before you buy a cup of coffee,” he said.

natrius 12y ago
Merchants who use BitPay and Coinbase to accept Bitcoin usually choose to let those processors convert the funds to dollars on their behalf. Neither PayPal nor the merchants will typically touch Bitcoin during a transaction.
embolalia 12y ago
Not sure where you get that they're ignoring it. TFA says nothing of taxes, and that burden falls on the buyer anyway. Unless you're saying that the IRS's guidelines mean it can't be used to buy things for some reason, which is just not true at all.
- rcraft 12y ago
  Ignoring in the sense that Paypal thinks its worth their time to facilitate consumer transactions based on bitcoin. As the bloomberg article states, if I have to factor in my my capital gains tax liability with each purchase of an ebook or mp3, then that is a royal pain and would lessen my desire to use bitcoin for everyday purchases. It seems to me that perhaps Paypal just see's the IRS guidelines as a non-factor for consumers who will largely just ignore the guidance similar to how consumers are technically supposed to pay state sales tax on online purchases.
DMac87 12y ago
My guess is that PayPal et al don't particularly care - the onus is on the bitcoin user (i.e. the consumer) to calculate capital gains, report to the IRS etc. Those consumers probably don't care - they'll wait to see how/if the IRS actually has a willingness/ability to enforce their own guidelines...

trevordev 12y ago

BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding to my emails. I will not use bitpay in the future.

tonyhb 12y ago
I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless. Regarding your AngelHack prize... the same thing happened to me. I'd be more skeptical of AngelHack than Bitpay, a well-funded global company, though: http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-angelhack-lawsuit-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-angelhack-lawsuit... It's not the first time I've heard of AngelHack not following through.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - DINKDINK 12y ago
    >Bitcoin addresses are intended to be single use, disposable keys rather a long term method of identification. A portion of Bitcoin's address design is intended to minimize publicity of EC public keys if at all possible. A potential work around is to just BitAuth with a HD wallet? Thereby negating any address-reuse issues. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...
  - martindale 12y ago
    You might be thinking of BitID, which tightly couples payment addresses to identity: https://github.com/bitid/bitid https://github.com/bitid/bitid – BitAuth does not use Bitcoin keypairs. We created BitAuth as a way to avoid coupling payments with identity, which is why the keypairs are independent and include a different prefix (0x02).

SuddsMcDuff 12y ago

Looks like winkdex.com has gone down under the load

drcode 12y ago
Nice catch- It'll be great to check Google trends in a few days.

highercenter 12y ago

More choices in how people create value, share it, buy, sell and trade it – that’s exactly what PayPal is all about,” said Scott Ellison, Senior Director, Strategy, PayPal. That's amazing! And me thinking PayPal was all about our money!

ssteinb 12y ago

Paypal is going to acquire the shit out of them. Calling it now.

justin_l 12y ago
That's all I can think of - Bitpay/Coinbase/Gocoin partnered with PayPal because PayPal offered to acquire one or all of them. Bitpay and Coinbase* offer only two advantages over PayPal - slightly cheaper transactions, and the ability to transact in Bitcoin. Due to the merchant account requirements of each you lose anonymous transactions, so for example Silk Road could never use one of these services. So it strikes me as extremely odd that these guys would be partnering with Paypal, basically giving away their advantage, if there wasn't something bigger in it for them down the road. * not sure about Gocoin as I haven't looked at its merchant account offering.

appleflaxen 12y ago

Nothing could make me less interested in BitPay. PayPal is just such a negative connotation in my mind that it turns me off of a business partner just to know they are collaborating.

jtwebman 12y ago

What do you guys think of Coinbase? Is it a good replacement for BitPay? Sorry I am new to this are but wanted to start accepting Bitcoins

earthmeLon 12y ago

Hmmmm... I thought that a large reason many people helped develop bitcoin and it's community was to thwart Paypal, its highly-politically-motivated nature, and others like it.