22 ms·

Stripe: Bitcoin

855 points by sunils34 12y ago

aakilfernandes 12y ago
> Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction. There are no other fees. Beautiful
- jszymborski 12y ago
  Wait, am I missing something or does coinbase not do this for free... or do they nab you some other way
  - dollaaron 12y ago
    Coinbase is free for the first million dollars in transactions. Bitpay is free IIRC.
  - yincrash 12y ago
    Coinbase charges a BTC <-> USD fee of 1%. Stripe is essentially charging for the same exchange service, but 0.5% instead. "Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars. Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction."
  - sudhirj 12y ago
    Coinbase does this for free, but they'll take their cut if you try to convert that into dollars. And they don't have a card option as well. This makes it dead simple for anyone to offer Bitcoin while automatically complying with the same reporting regulations as card payments.
  - matthewarkin 12y ago
    Last I checked, Stripe worked on top of the Coinbase API. The main benefit to using Stripe is that's it's one api and one account. For merchants, you also get fiat instead of holding bitcoin (I assume this is what the fee is primarily for). If you're already using Stripe checkout, adding bitcoin can be done in less than 5 lines of code.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  Yes, but of course the exchange rate matters as well. It's trivial for Bitcoin payment processors hide an extra "fee" in the exchange rate by giving you a worse exchange rate than you'd get at Bitcoin exchanges and pocketing the difference. (I have no idea if Stripe does that or not)
  - baddox 12y ago
    That cost would be borne by the customer, won't it? I guess that's still in some sense a fee from the Stripe vendor's perspective, because the Bitcoin price will be higher for the customer and thus the quantity demanded will be lower than it would be with the vendor's USD sticker price.
  - collision 12y ago
    We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.
    - Killswitch 12y ago
      Awesome work! I've been trying to push bitcoin at our company as a form of payment, we use Stripe already, so this will make it easier.
    - foobarqux 12y ago
      Marking it up from what? There isn't really a canonical exchange rate.
    - kchoudhu 12y ago
      Inherent to Stripe processing BTC is the fact that you are now a foreign exchange broker. Here's a small sample of why you're going to have to do a lot better than "we only charge 0.5%" to convince me that adding FX risk into my payment processing stack is a good idea: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manipulated-foreign-exchange-in-ways-you-can-t-teach http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manip... http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-charge-extra-for-not-manipulating-fx http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-... And that's just from the last three months, in an arena that is already heavily regulated by the SEC.
manuelflara 12y ago
I absolutely love the little animated step by step process shown of how it works. Is this done with an open source library?
- benjamindc 12y ago
  I'm just using a tiny lib that makes things easier: https://github.com/bendc/animate https://github.com/bendc/animate Other than that, it's just vanilla js/css.
  - brentm 12y ago
    It looks great. Would love to see a blog post explaining your methodology.
    - benjamindc 12y ago
      Thanks! I might actually write a "behind the scenes" post, assuming I find the motivation to do it :p
      - octref 12y ago
        Please do, sir! I'm a CS student really interested in web design, and I just started dabbling CSS animation for a month. To be honest, this page, together with Google IO 2015 page, are the best I've seen. I really look forward to reading your post about how this page is built or the source code.
  - sergiotapia 12y ago
    I just want to say that you're one of my favorite designers out there and I enjoy your various posts out there on the web. Thanks so much for sharing your talent for us developers to peek inside!
    - benjamindc 12y ago
      Thank you, means a lot :)
27182818284 12y ago
What is the "open wallet" step? That can't mean I have to have a wallet with Stripe, can it?
- collision 12y ago
  The "Open Wallet" link has a bitcoin URI. If you have a wallet installed, it'll pop open that wallet. More here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawi... Stripe doesn't have a Bitcoin wallet for consumers.
veesahni 12y ago
Is this available to canadian stripe accounts too or just US?
- jxm262 12y ago
  Although I can't find it stated explicitly, if you look at "Guide Part 2: Creating a charge" :currency => "usd", # presently can only make bitcoin charges in USD So, looks like USD for now. Although I think you could probabaly just implement the conversion yourself on your own wrapper code. <<Edit>> my apologies. I misread your question, thinking you were referring to currencies. But assuming they only accept USD, i'd have to assume its only for US accounts too? Perhaps someone can chime in and let us know though. Or try it with a canadian account and see what happens.
- krithix 12y ago
  I work for Stripe. While people anywhere around the world can pay with Bitcoin (and we've seen payments from over 60 countries during our beta), we currently only support merchants who have U.S. bank accounts. (Fun fact: Our first Bitcoin user had a Canadian Stripe account, but also a U.S. bank account.)
  - isthisforme 12y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Could a Canadian Stripe user just start using the API and then go open a us bank account after launch, or would the us bank account be needed prior to going live?
    - krithix 12y ago
      You can get everything set up in test mode, but you will need to activate the bank account before going live. If helpful, there's more info on testing here: https://stripe.com/docs/testing#how-do-i-test-bitcoin https://stripe.com/docs/testing#how-do-i-test-bitcoin
  - isthisforme 12y ago
    And can you clarify if by us bank account you mean 'us dollar denominated', or 'us dollar denominated and a us bank'. USD bank accounts are very common in Canada. Not that needing a US bank account is necessarily a show-stopper, but it's more work.
jxm262 12y ago
> Fluctuation-resistant - Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars. I don't think I fully understand this part. Does the exchange rate remain static for a period of time, or do they just mean to say it's automatically converted for you? If the latter, how is this fluctuation resistant. Regardless, I'm very happy. Been waiting for this to come out of beta.
- rukittenme 12y ago
  Fluctuation resistant for the seller but not the buyer.
j42 12y ago
Honestly, this may be what it takes to see more mainstream consumer adoption. A lot of the apps with high levels of penetration in this generalized demographic seem to use Stripe--if it's truly a frictionless integration, it will be really interesting to see the market's response. Coinbase & exchange API's were the first step. Single-script hosted payment processing with a UI focus (accessible to tech and grassroots e-commerce alike) seems to be the next. And to the Stripe team--Thank you! I've used many merchant processors, from 2004 until now. Along with Braintree you paved the way for this future in MP, and overall created a brilliantly engineered system that's a pleasure to work with.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  The bigger problem with mainstream consumer adoption is the fact that mainstream consumers don't have any bitcoins to spend. Then there's the fact that you have to use an exchange to buy the coins in the first place and... let's just say bitcoin exchanges aren't exactly known as secure financial institutions. It seems a large bitcoin exchange is hacked and shuts down just about weekly: Just hours ago: Cavritex, Canada's largest bitcoin exchange, announced that it was hacked and will shut down 4 days ago: BTER of China was hacked and lost $1.75m Last week: Exco.in was hacked, apparently lost all customer-held coins, and shut down Last week: Hong Kong's MyCoin died and was apparently a ponzi scheme that had $387 And that's not even counting the abrupt closures of other exchanges telling users to get their funds out ASAP or lose them.
  - venaoy 12y ago
    > you have to use an exchange to buy the coins No you don't. You can sell stuff on Craigslist for bitcoins. You can mine. You can buy coins in person from a friend/from localbitcoins. You can receive remittance from your oversea family in bitcoins. You can buy them from a Bitcoin ATM. Etc. There are tons of ways to acquire bitcoins without "having" to use an exchange.
    - tonyhb 12y ago
      Shameless plug, you can also get paid with bitcoins via https://www.incoin.io/ https://www.incoin.io/. We need more of this. I'd be happy to see another proper payroll company with the option to pay via bitcoin.
adriancooney 12y ago
What a fantastic product page. After less that 30 seconds, I knew exactly what Stripe was doing with Bitcoin, how to use the new feature and integrate it. This is great news for Bitcoin. If all it takes is one extra line of code for online retailers to start accepting the currency, widespread adoption could sky rocket. That's always been Bitcoin's crutch, simple integration. Others like Coinbase and Bitpay have made it much easier to accept Bitcoin, but usually more services are required to accept other forms of payment. This simple catch-all solution is a game-changer. Congratulations Stripe.
- lukasm 12y ago
  Actually, I disagree. I prefer video. I can always rewind to read it, pause if I'm distracted and it's very small text on my phone.
  - icehawk219 12y ago
    I agree. If you insist on having it be animated make it a video. I'd actually just prefer a few screenshots showing the key things that I can go back and forth between so I don't have to sit and watch something that could be summed up in 3 or 4 slides that are digested in a few seconds.
    - ssmoot 12y ago
      Ditto. Too fast. For me this isn't an exemplar of effective communication. It's a complete failure to deliver whatever that animation was trying to communicate because I only got 1 second each to absorb the text and the slide. Maybe I'm just slow, but a few stacked section tags with the same information presented statically would've been so much more effective. Javascript for it's own sake, hampering effective communication; it's the Flash splash page all over again.
  - general_failure 12y ago
    I agree as well. The animation was way too fast for me.
- 12y ago
nailer 12y ago
Greg Brockman from Stripe said this is exactly what it would take for BTC to take off commercially a year ago: (after discussing why regular people probably don't want to store value in BitCoins) > However, Bitcoin has huge potential as a way to transport value. It’s surprisingly difficult to move money today ...compounding the issue, value transport becomes especially challenging as soon as there’s a regional border involved. > Cryptocurrencies have given us a real opportunity to solve these problems. https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective
- foobarqux 12y ago
  I thought he said BTC wouldn't succeed as a payment mechanism, but might as a settlement and clearing one.
  - nailer 12y ago
    You can specify amounts in USD and get the exact amount back regardless of BTC fluctuations, which seems close to his original premise.
    - foobarqux 12y ago
      Not that close since to the user it is a BTC payment system.
      - Pyxl101 12y ago
        Why couldn't the user buy the bitcoin in dollars moments before, using the same price-stabilizing mechanism? Could an exchange engage in both operations simultaneously somehow as a sort of market-maker?
roasbeef 12y ago
Disappointed to see that they don't appear any PaymentProtocol[1] integration. [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawi...
- cca 12y ago
  (I work at Stripe.) We love the PaymentProtocol, and we have an integration internally. Because the protocol is fairly new, we want to gauge demand from our users before exposing the extra infrastructure.
mrb 12y ago
Stripe's Terms of Service reveal that they use Coinbase in the backend to transact and exchange the bitcoins: https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms If you are a small merchant planning to do less than $1-2 million dollars in sales, you might still prefer using Coinbase directly instead of Stripe though, because Coinbase waives all fees until the first $1 million dollars (then it's 1%), but Stripe charges a constant 0.5% fee. There is a tad more info from https://twitter.com/stripe https://twitter.com/stripe : "Our Bitcoin support is now fully live: https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin ." "It's fully-integrated with the rest of Stripe: same APIs, same reporting, same dashboard. (Just like our Alipay support.)" "While testing our Bitcoin support, we had people from 60 different countries use it to pay. (Howdy, Guatemala, Algeria, Rwanda, Cambodia!)" "Particular thanks to @Namecheap, @Tarsnap, @HandUp, and @Grooveshark for their feedback as we developed this." "And as for https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin itself -- this is our first, but hopefully not last, page to feature an animated Vim." For the record, Stripe's Bitcoin support has been in beta since March 2014. Tarsnap were the first users: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.h... Edit: @ThrustVectoring: it does not take 5 weeks of a developer's time to integrate with Coinbase, especially for the "small" merchants (<$1-2M in sales) that my comment was written for. But I agree the appeal of simplicity if you already take Stripe is there :)
- ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  In favor of Stripe: developers cost at least $2k/week, and .5% of $2MM is $10k. Ease of integration can easily dominate transaction fees.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  You can integrate bitcoin support into Stripe Checkout with just a few lines of code - one attribute on the client, and 2-3 lines of extra code to create your Charge object in a different way on the server, at which point you process it in almost exactly the same way as a card payment (potentially minus some UI details in confirmation messages, etc). Integrating Coinbase involves writing your own "payment" abstraction in place of being able to use Stripe's all the way through your application, then implementing both Stripe and Coinbase on top of that. While this might be good in the long run (so you can switch off of Stripe easily), it's not so good for smaller shops/services which don't need that complexity yet.
yellowapple 12y ago
Is there a way to just accept Bitcoin using this without automatically converting it into a fiat currency? That would make this complete for me.
lbotos 12y ago
Any idea how stripe is handling confirmations? (I'm a bitcoin newbie, but I know that consensus took a minute or so the last time I had done anything with BTC.) Has that changed?
- cca 12y ago
  (Christian from Stripe here.) We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed. The time-delay between when the customer pushes the transaction and when we notify our users is typically less than 15 seconds and almost always less than 60 seconds.
  - Shank 12y ago
    Has the technology changed/evolved enough that that's credible? I was under the impression that it wasn't "fully confirmed" by the network until a new block was mined, or you could have double spend attacks?
    - sfeng 12y ago
      Credit card fraud protection often relies on heuristics, perhaps they are doing a similar thing here.
  - veryluckyxyz 12y ago
    > We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed. Can you please elaborate?
    - NeutronBoy 12y ago
      Really the key question is: if a transaction that you believe will become confirmed, turns out to be invalid, who wears that? Stripe, or me? Will Stripe eat that, or will I get hit with the difference?
  - sah88 12y ago
    What happens if it does not get confirmed. Do you debit the account by an equivalent amount or eat it?
clamprecht 12y ago
Does it allow bitcoin-paid monthly subscriptions?
- krithix 12y ago
  Stripe doesn't currently support recurring or repeated payments with Bitcoin—the receivers can only be used for a single payment.
veryluckyxyz 12y ago
Can someone tell how Stripe (or other providers) guarantee immunity from price fluctuations?
- nate_martin 12y ago
  Merchant sets their price in dollars (for example) and the price in Bitcoin is calculated when a transaction is made using the current btc exchange rate.
  - veryluckyxyz 12y ago
    Stripe (in this case) receives bitcoins and it is exposed to fluctuations. So, if Stripe guarantees the seller a price for the bitcoin, I would think that Stripe has a mechanism to limit or even eliminate the risk from that exposure. I am interested in learning how Stripe does it. Do you know how Stripe does it?
    - aet 12y ago
      Can they do the conversion realtime and charge the client whatever rate they get?
      - veryluckyxyz 12y ago
        Perhaps, but they don't say it explicitly. For example, Bitpay says (at https://bitpay.com/ https://bitpay.com/) ` Charge $1, get $1 Instant conversion, no transaction fee, and bank deposits in US Dollars, Euros, GBP, CAD and more. We take the bitcoin exchange rate risk, your customers get the best rate on the market, and you get a payment you can count on, every time. `
    - joosters 12y ago
      Maybe they just hope that the fluctuations will balance out?
borski 12y ago
I'm assuming this doesn't work for recurring payments?
- krithix 12y ago
  (I work for Stripe.) That's correct. Stripe does not currently support recurring or repeated payments with Bitcoin. The receivers can only be used for a single payment.
  - undefined0 12y ago
    Since you could now be considered 'big leaders' in the bitcoin world. You really should lobby for a BIP70 specification which allows for wallets to subscribe people to payments. However, then would be the question of how can both the wallet provider and Stripe agree on the exchange rate. In short, I'd like to see BIP70 become like PayPal's IPN, so it can notify websites of subscriptions, refunds, payment requests, instant payment confirmation from a trusted third party (Coinbase would be considered trusted to tell us a payments been instantly recieved without having to wait for confirmation), etc. I've have these ideas for a while but I'm not known in the bitcoin space so my comments don't make any impact. Stripe could considering thinking about such specifications, I hope?
    - aaxe 12y ago
      Paypal's IPN is the worst piece of garbage ever.
ericfrederich 12y ago
Too bad BitCoin isn't default and more of an opt-out kind of thing. Eventually...
lisa_henderson 12y ago
The Bitcoin community might want to take a deep breath and recognize where Bitcoin has the most real-world use. The idea that my mom will someday use Bitcoin to buy books online is about as realistic as the belief that, any minute now, youngsters will realize that the daily newspaper is better read in paper form, because of the texture and experience and the anonymity of paper. For that matter, I am a computer programmer, and I love to play with new technologies, and I'm utterly unable to imagine why I'd ever want to pay with anything with Bitcoin. There are a large number of people living in China who would like to get around the nation's currency controls. There are a large number of people living in Russia that want to move money without being tracked. There are a large number of people living in Latin America who want to avoid taxes in their own countries. This is what drives the use of Bitcoin. The only large scale need for Bitcoin is criminal activity, in China, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere. Currency regulated by the government is a classic "good enough" product. It might lack some features that would be nice, but 99% of the public doesn't seem to care. Rather, they want more money, but they don't want to change money. If they had real doubts about the currency, they would dump it in exchange for real goods. But instead, most people work hard to acquire more money, and they show no real concern with the standard proxies for currency (credit cards, checks, etc).
- bhayden 12y ago
  The appeal of bitcoin to me, a regular American, is much the same appeal that using a VPN, having encrypted hard drives, and not sharing information about myself all over social media does. There is very little ability to have privacy when paying with USD. You can have cash transactions, in real life, or send money orders through the mail. That's pretty much it. I want privacy in my spending and in my assets. If I like reading about hacking and buy an eBook about it, I don't want that to be evidence against me when law enforcement comes knocking and tries to trump up charges against (see HN post about this just today). If I buy a VPN service, I don't want to become a target for surveillance. There are tons of legitimate, legal reasons to want privacy in purchasing and assets.
  - amalcon 12y ago
    Publishing your entire transaction history for the entire world to see doesn't seem like the best way to have privacy, even if it is under a pseudonym. After all, purchasing history seems like one of the best tools to trace a pseudonym.
Animats 12y ago
"Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars." Looks like another Coinbase reseller. Coinbase has a merchant program. They guarantee their buy price of Bitcoin for a minute or two, to cover the volatility between when the web site accepts the Bitcoins and Coinbase dumps them on an exchange. During periods of high volatility, this service is sometimes suspended. Many shopping cart programs already accept Bitcoins and convert them through Coinbase. Few merchants accept Bitcoins and accept the conversion risk themselves. This kind of service has been available for the last year. It's used a little, but not much.
curiously 12y ago
I just don't think this is useful unless you were offering a service that only works with bitcoins. The wide adoption won't change Bitcoin, it's the unpredictable and manipulative market pricing that makes me hesitant to accept it. With USD you know that if you got 100 it won't turn into $10 in a few weeks but the reality with bitcoin is that the threat exists
chris_va 12y ago
Question for Stripe folks. At creation, Stripe guarantees an exchange rate that is usable for 10 minutes. If the customer sends bitcoin to the receiver after the 10 minutes have expired, we’ll still process the transaction but the conversion amount will no longer be guaranteed. Say I am a merchant, and I want to make $10 on my transaction. With a 0.5% fee: - Without BTC, I charge $10.05 to the user, you take 5 cents, and I am left with $10. - With BTC, I charge $10.05 to stripe, which gets converted to BTC at some exchange rate, and gets charged to the user. Does Stripe guarantee me $10? Or am I subject to the fluctuations of Stripe's exchange rate (say the user takes 20 minutes to finish the transaction)? Is there any way to guarantee that I get paid $10 or the transaction fails?
- gigq 12y ago
  I don't know the answer to this but given the user is the one who didn't complete the transaction in 10 minutes they are probably held responsible. I would guess if it was underpaid they would have to send more to the address (the same as if they only paid half the bill). If it's overpaid they probably send the overpaid amount back as a refund to the address it was sent from (or keep it).
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    It would be interesting to see if you could "lock in" a BTC price and then wait 9 minutes to see if BTC goes up or down (meaning you are over/under paying) then decide if you still want to buy. I'd think there would be protections against something like this though.
MMateus 12y ago
Great news! I wish Stripe can be available in more countries soon.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
RemoteWorker 12y ago
I find it hilarious how Bitcoin haters (like the ones we have here on HN) say it's never going to work, but then they spend hours every day trying to talk people out of using it.
- lmm 12y ago
  The value of these things is a Keynesian beauty contest. If enough people decide that Bitcoin is a valid currency then it is a valid currency (just like baseball cards). I think that would be bad for society. Any new value in the bitcoin ecosystem increases the value held by the early adopters - who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals, and the rest are the miners who enabled them. (bitcoin does have some advantages for some legitimate use cases, but the biggest advantages were for the criminal use cases).
  - RemoteWorker 12y ago
    Think of the children!
  - venaoy 12y ago
    > who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals This is false. And you have no source to prove it. I know a lot of early adopters through various channels. They are geeks, crypto nerds, cypherpunks. Think guys like Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. Nice guys who like to explore new ideas. Maybe you are just upset that you "missed the boat" on bitcoin or something. But you've got to stop believing every Bitcoin user is a criminal.
- al2o3cr 12y ago
  I find it hilarious how Bitcoin cheerleaders say there aren't any downsides, and then spend hours every day posting "chargebacks aren't important" and "merchants will obviously pass all the savings on to consumers". YMMV.
  - RemoteWorker 12y ago
    What do chargebacks have to do with a currency? Chargebacks is something offered by services built on top of the currency, not the currency itself. Else tell me how to chargeback USD bills. If you think chargebacks are the most important thing mentioning when attacking Bitcoin, then it seems like it does have a bright future.
logicallee 12y ago
why do we - normal people - want to handle a currency free of any legal oversight or reversibility/traceability even in the case of outright theft? see this story of ours just from the past month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053621 they know exactly who did it and why/how it happened... what advantage is there to the coins themselves being completely untraceable, transactions completely irreversible? suppose your net worth is largely a matter of the value of your startup at its last valuation. would you prefer to just have that many hundred thousand dollars in cash in your home? But with the added benefit that it can disappear at a distance without anyone visiting your home? Bitcoin is great but isn't it about time to put a sane banking layer on top of it? Note: like all sane people I believe in a mix of government oversight and personal freedom, maybe 90% the latter. But having an untraceable currency doesn't make me any more free. Unlike every tech luminary, Satoshi can't even identify himself.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Because legal oversight and traceability are often bugs, not features. The middlemen required to deal with those two things are often bloated, slow to react, corrupt, expensive, and in some cases, all of the above. The idea that "I want to send some value to someone else" requires jumping through so many hoops, and having so many bites taken out of it, in 2015, is a bit silly. How do chargebacks work with cash? Exactly. Yet we still use it. This honestly smells like the government anti-encryption argument. "You have nothing to hide, so why do so?"
stefanobernardi 12y ago
By enabling BTC payments, does this mean that Stripe will change the list of "prohibited" uses? That list is in line with what are usually high-risk card transactions, but by removing that risk (almost) entirely, it seems like this could finally enable a wave of new commerce on diverse and neglected categories. I'm probably assuming a no as they'll want to keep the card AND bitcoin and not do jut BTC, but a man can dream.
- espeed 12y ago
  The Stripe TOS says: "Most Prohibited Business categories are imposed by Card Network rules or the requirements of our banking providers or processors" (https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses). Bitcoin avoids much of the high-risk card issues so will Stripe update its Bitcoin TOS to allow more high-risk transactions and regulated industries?
brosky117 12y ago
I'm not really into front-end but man...that page was beautifully executed.
thucydides 12y ago
Who wants to use this most? Porn companies. Their chargeback rates are obscenely high. And Bitcoins can't be "clawed back," as grubles put it. ed: "wants to" instead of "will"
- haakon 12y ago
  Except Stripe doesn't service pornography businesses. (Source: https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses)
- undefined0 12y ago
  "Their chargeback rates are obscenely high". I've always understood that porn companies have difficulty finding a friendly payment processor, but I've never heard that they recieve a high chargeback rate before. Do you know why that is? What do users gain from chargebacking porn websites over chargebacking dropbox, for example?
  - sanswork 12y ago
    Their partner sees "XYZ.com" on the bill and goes to look it up. "Why are you buying porn?" "Oh that wasn't me! Someone must have stolen our card" and they submit a chargeback.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      I'm sure regret is also a part of it as well. "Why did I spend that money?" And of course, outright theft of services, where they watch/download whatever it is they're interested in and then cancel the charge.
  - iopq 12y ago
    Because the porn site says "free for 3 days" and of course nobody remembers to actually cancel the subscription after 3 days. When they get the bill a month later they say "I never bought a full subscription!" and they cancel. It's a cat and mouse game. If customers KNEW they couldn't keep getting charged they'd gladly pay $1 to watch for one day. $1 is STILL going to have $0.05 fee, not $0.35 or whatever the CC processor would charge for such a small transaction.
TomAnthony 12y ago
Interesting that Stripe invested in Stellar (https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar) which I couldn't help think of as a 'Bitcoin competitor'. It makes sense that they still increase support for the more established/famous cryptocurrency that is Bitcoin but I thought they would still be interested in somehow relating this to Stellar.
pugz 12y ago
This is fantastic. However, I couldn't see any mention of a Bitcoin-specific minimum charge. Is it still 50c as per Stripe's existing documentation[1]? [1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/smallest-amount-to-charge https://support.stripe.com/questions/smallest-amount-to-char...
- runeks 12y ago
  I'd really like to see this question answered as well. Also, I'd really like to know: is the credit card fee still ~2.5% if I receive 50 cents USD using credit card via Stripe? Or is there an additional, flat rate fee?
isthisforme 12y ago
Can someone explain if a Canadian stripe merchant processing in US dollars can use this?
heathermiller 12y ago
A "how it's made" of the amazing product intro/page would be a very nice read!!
hippich 12y ago
What customer loose when paying with bitcoin - protection. On the other hand when customer pays with credit card, merchant essentially do not have protection. But merchants cover that by increasing price to cover accidental fraud. Therefore merchants should lower price by 2-3% (credit card processing fees) + 5%-25% (not sure about exact amount) to cover lost protection by customer and gained protection for business. When this happen, I bet there will be some people who will be alright getting better price in exchange for loss of some protections. Otherwise it doesn't make sense now to not use credit card.
diaz 12y ago
I'd never thought I'd read so many comments about people questioning whether using Bitcoins to buy anything is useful or not or even if people would use. Specially in a place like this with so many technology aware people. Giving more choices for payment is good. Sellers are including more people that can pay for their services/products. If nobody buys anything with bitcoin they lose nothing and business goes as usual. Simple. Please get out of your bubbles and think a little more if you can't find scenarios where people would use Bitcoins rather than money. In my case If I start seeing more places accepting Bitcoins it's only more probable that I'll use it and put more money in my wallet for that. I can remember of two places I could use Bitcoins right now: Humble Bundles and Namecheap. Given the choice and more sellers using it I will use that option more and more. Some of the credit card scenarios people are talking is again US specific. If I want to pay for something quick and simple online I have to get really out of my way to do it. I don't have credit cards and lots and lots of people don't have them and avoid them. I don't want to have one ever. Currently for me to pay anything online I have to go to MBNet to create a virtual credit card for each purchase I want to do. That card is valid for one purchase only and for a single shop/seller. There's another option where I can create a virtual card valid for one year but I can only use it in the same seller/shop. Only after that can I use all those payments systems on the internet. If I want to be protected with Paypal I have to add and remove a card each time I need to use it. So lately I just input the virtual credit card info where sellers ask in their forms and don't even care about paypal or amazon or anything else. Basically I don't really have much of any kind of protection anyway doing all this work above comparing to the simple use case of having bitcoins and just directly giving you the money without caring anymore. Plus I don't have to keep looking at my credit card looking for any suspicious transaction that the seller could at any time issue to me. I give the money exactly that I want and I can just go with my life without thinking about it anymore. And this is just my point of view. I can clearly imagine many people with very different reasons simply using Bitcoins if that option is available. Now the only thing really missing is being able to implement a simple shop using Stripe from this side of the Atlantic :P. Congratulations Stripe and keep the good work.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  >Now the only thing really missing is being able to implement a simple shop using Stripe from this side of the Atlantic :P. Why can't you? Stripe has supported the UK and other countries for a year or something.
TACIXAT 12y ago
Hey Stripe, are you reading this? I'm deciding between payment processors right now. I plan to have excessively low prices, in the range of 1 dollar per year. PayPal and Amazon offer micro transaction pricing at 5 cents + 5% of each transaction. Care to compete?
- woowowp 12y ago
  0.5% is less than 5 cents + 5%. For a $1 transaction, Paypal/Amazon would charge 10 cents and Stripe would charge 0.5 cents for a bitcoin transaction. Unless you're talking about credit card transactions.
  - TACIXAT 12y ago
    I am talking about credit card transactions. I plan on accepting bitcoin, but I want to accept normal payments as well. Right now it seems like Amazon + Coinbase will be my choice.
knwang 12y ago
Congrats team Stripe! Fantastic feature as always. In our case, we promise full refund if our users are not happy with our service. Is there a way to refund customers bitcoins as easy as how it is currently with credit cards?
UXDork 12y ago
Okay, Stripe. Can I accept bitcoins and automatically convert them to USD? I need an instant conversion back to USD after the transaction so I don't lose money due to volatility. Does stripe let merchants auto-convert their Bitcoin payments to USD? This would solve the problem entirely and I'd be happy to pass the extra savings on to customers. I could probably give about a 6% discount because I wouldn't take profit from the transaction savings. In fact, given the fee is .05% of the transaction, this could be the first service to ever enable micropayments. Perfect for a lot of internet/new technology services. The key is to convert the customer's USD to bitcoin instantly, pay with bitcoin, and convert the received bitcoin back to USD instantly again.
- lachyg 12y ago
  (I work at Stripe) Correct! You set your price in USD, we present the amount in bitcoins to your customer, and guarantee you the price you set in USD.
- sjcsjc 12y ago
  I think you meant 0.5% for the fee.
diltonm 12y ago
If Stripe is doing Bitcoin then I now know to stay from and recommend others to say away from Stripe.
kanwal 12y ago
Can this be used in India ?
amelius 12y ago
Could this mean we will soon be moving towards micropayments? And perhaps less dependence on app stores?
- runeks 12y ago
  Now that is actually an area where bitcoin makes sense. Use Stripe to put up a payment gateway in front of articles. Just send 50 cents in bitcoin to the address that is displayed, and you can read the article instantly.
badgercapital 12y ago
Wow.. I know a few startups that just killed after this announcement.
Toadsoup 12y ago
This is great and I intend on giving it a shot to accept bitcoin in the near future. I would like to see it as an option to keep bitcoin rather than having it automatically exchanged to USD on my behalf. It would allow people to assess their own risk tolerance if they wanted to hold bitcoin or if they had other services that work well with bitcoin.

Stripe: Bitcoin

855 points by sunils34 12y ago

aakilfernandes 12y ago

> Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction. There are no other fees. Beautiful

jszymborski 12y ago
Wait, am I missing something or does coinbase not do this for free... or do they nab you some other way
- dollaaron 12y ago
  Coinbase is free for the first million dollars in transactions. Bitpay is free IIRC.
- yincrash 12y ago
  Coinbase charges a BTC <-> USD fee of 1%. Stripe is essentially charging for the same exchange service, but 0.5% instead. "Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars. Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction."
- sudhirj 12y ago
  Coinbase does this for free, but they'll take their cut if you try to convert that into dollars. And they don't have a card option as well. This makes it dead simple for anyone to offer Bitcoin while automatically complying with the same reporting regulations as card payments.
- matthewarkin 12y ago
  Last I checked, Stripe worked on top of the Coinbase API. The main benefit to using Stripe is that's it's one api and one account. For merchants, you also get fiat instead of holding bitcoin (I assume this is what the fee is primarily for). If you're already using Stripe checkout, adding bitcoin can be done in less than 5 lines of code.
tlrobinson 12y ago
Yes, but of course the exchange rate matters as well. It's trivial for Bitcoin payment processors hide an extra "fee" in the exchange rate by giving you a worse exchange rate than you'd get at Bitcoin exchanges and pocketing the difference. (I have no idea if Stripe does that or not)
- baddox 12y ago
  That cost would be borne by the customer, won't it? I guess that's still in some sense a fee from the Stripe vendor's perspective, because the Bitcoin price will be higher for the customer and thus the quantity demanded will be lower than it would be with the vendor's USD sticker price.
- collision 12y ago
  We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.
  - Killswitch 12y ago
    Awesome work! I've been trying to push bitcoin at our company as a form of payment, we use Stripe already, so this will make it easier.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    Marking it up from what? There isn't really a canonical exchange rate.
  - kchoudhu 12y ago
    Inherent to Stripe processing BTC is the fact that you are now a foreign exchange broker. Here's a small sample of why you're going to have to do a lot better than "we only charge 0.5%" to convince me that adding FX risk into my payment processing stack is a good idea: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manipulated-foreign-exchange-in-ways-you-can-t-teach http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manip... http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-charge-extra-for-not-manipulating-fx http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-... And that's just from the last three months, in an arena that is already heavily regulated by the SEC.

manuelflara 12y ago

I absolutely love the little animated step by step process shown of how it works. Is this done with an open source library?

benjamindc 12y ago
I'm just using a tiny lib that makes things easier: https://github.com/bendc/animate https://github.com/bendc/animate Other than that, it's just vanilla js/css.
- brentm 12y ago
  It looks great. Would love to see a blog post explaining your methodology.
  - benjamindc 12y ago
    Thanks! I might actually write a "behind the scenes" post, assuming I find the motivation to do it :p
    - octref 12y ago
      Please do, sir! I'm a CS student really interested in web design, and I just started dabbling CSS animation for a month. To be honest, this page, together with Google IO 2015 page, are the best I've seen. I really look forward to reading your post about how this page is built or the source code.
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  I just want to say that you're one of my favorite designers out there and I enjoy your various posts out there on the web. Thanks so much for sharing your talent for us developers to peek inside!
  - benjamindc 12y ago
    Thank you, means a lot :)

27182818284 12y ago

What is the "open wallet" step? That can't mean I have to have a wallet with Stripe, can it?

collision 12y ago
The "Open Wallet" link has a bitcoin URI. If you have a wallet installed, it'll pop open that wallet. More here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawi... Stripe doesn't have a Bitcoin wallet for consumers.

veesahni 12y ago

Is this available to canadian stripe accounts too or just US?

jxm262 12y ago
Although I can't find it stated explicitly, if you look at "Guide Part 2: Creating a charge" :currency => "usd", # presently can only make bitcoin charges in USD So, looks like USD for now. Although I think you could probabaly just implement the conversion yourself on your own wrapper code. <<Edit>> my apologies. I misread your question, thinking you were referring to currencies. But assuming they only accept USD, i'd have to assume its only for US accounts too? Perhaps someone can chime in and let us know though. Or try it with a canadian account and see what happens.
krithix 12y ago
I work for Stripe. While people anywhere around the world can pay with Bitcoin (and we've seen payments from over 60 countries during our beta), we currently only support merchants who have U.S. bank accounts. (Fun fact: Our first Bitcoin user had a Canadian Stripe account, but also a U.S. bank account.)
- isthisforme 12y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Could a Canadian Stripe user just start using the API and then go open a us bank account after launch, or would the us bank account be needed prior to going live?
  - krithix 12y ago
    You can get everything set up in test mode, but you will need to activate the bank account before going live. If helpful, there's more info on testing here: https://stripe.com/docs/testing#how-do-i-test-bitcoin https://stripe.com/docs/testing#how-do-i-test-bitcoin
- isthisforme 12y ago
  And can you clarify if by us bank account you mean 'us dollar denominated', or 'us dollar denominated and a us bank'. USD bank accounts are very common in Canada. Not that needing a US bank account is necessarily a show-stopper, but it's more work.

jxm262 12y ago

> Fluctuation-resistant - Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars. I don't think I fully understand this part. Does the exchange rate remain static for a period of time, or do they just mean to say it's automatically converted for you? If the latter, how is this fluctuation resistant. Regardless, I'm very happy. Been waiting for this to come out of beta.

rukittenme 12y ago
Fluctuation resistant for the seller but not the buyer.

j42 12y ago

Honestly, this may be what it takes to see more mainstream consumer adoption. A lot of the apps with high levels of penetration in this generalized demographic seem to use Stripe--if it's truly a frictionless integration, it will be really interesting to see the market's response. Coinbase & exchange API's were the first step. Single-script hosted payment processing with a UI focus (accessible to tech and grassroots e-commerce alike) seems to be the next. And to the Stripe team--Thank you! I've used many merchant processors, from 2004 until now. Along with Braintree you paved the way for this future in MP, and overall created a brilliantly engineered system that's a pleasure to work with.

JohnTHaller 12y ago
The bigger problem with mainstream consumer adoption is the fact that mainstream consumers don't have any bitcoins to spend. Then there's the fact that you have to use an exchange to buy the coins in the first place and... let's just say bitcoin exchanges aren't exactly known as secure financial institutions. It seems a large bitcoin exchange is hacked and shuts down just about weekly: Just hours ago: Cavritex, Canada's largest bitcoin exchange, announced that it was hacked and will shut down 4 days ago: BTER of China was hacked and lost $1.75m Last week: Exco.in was hacked, apparently lost all customer-held coins, and shut down Last week: Hong Kong's MyCoin died and was apparently a ponzi scheme that had $387 And that's not even counting the abrupt closures of other exchanges telling users to get their funds out ASAP or lose them.
- venaoy 12y ago
  > you have to use an exchange to buy the coins No you don't. You can sell stuff on Craigslist for bitcoins. You can mine. You can buy coins in person from a friend/from localbitcoins. You can receive remittance from your oversea family in bitcoins. You can buy them from a Bitcoin ATM. Etc. There are tons of ways to acquire bitcoins without "having" to use an exchange.
  - tonyhb 12y ago
    Shameless plug, you can also get paid with bitcoins via https://www.incoin.io/ https://www.incoin.io/. We need more of this. I'd be happy to see another proper payroll company with the option to pay via bitcoin.

adriancooney 12y ago

What a fantastic product page. After less that 30 seconds, I knew exactly what Stripe was doing with Bitcoin, how to use the new feature and integrate it. This is great news for Bitcoin. If all it takes is one extra line of code for online retailers to start accepting the currency, widespread adoption could sky rocket. That's always been Bitcoin's crutch, simple integration. Others like Coinbase and Bitpay have made it much easier to accept Bitcoin, but usually more services are required to accept other forms of payment. This simple catch-all solution is a game-changer. Congratulations Stripe.

lukasm 12y ago
Actually, I disagree. I prefer video. I can always rewind to read it, pause if I'm distracted and it's very small text on my phone.
- icehawk219 12y ago
  I agree. If you insist on having it be animated make it a video. I'd actually just prefer a few screenshots showing the key things that I can go back and forth between so I don't have to sit and watch something that could be summed up in 3 or 4 slides that are digested in a few seconds.
  - ssmoot 12y ago
    Ditto. Too fast. For me this isn't an exemplar of effective communication. It's a complete failure to deliver whatever that animation was trying to communicate because I only got 1 second each to absorb the text and the slide. Maybe I'm just slow, but a few stacked section tags with the same information presented statically would've been so much more effective. Javascript for it's own sake, hampering effective communication; it's the Flash splash page all over again.
- general_failure 12y ago
  I agree as well. The animation was way too fast for me.
12y ago

nailer 12y ago

Greg Brockman from Stripe said this is exactly what it would take for BTC to take off commercially a year ago: (after discussing why regular people probably don't want to store value in BitCoins) > However, Bitcoin has huge potential as a way to transport value. It’s surprisingly difficult to move money today ...compounding the issue, value transport becomes especially challenging as soon as there’s a regional border involved. > Cryptocurrencies have given us a real opportunity to solve these problems. https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective

foobarqux 12y ago
I thought he said BTC wouldn't succeed as a payment mechanism, but might as a settlement and clearing one.
- nailer 12y ago
  You can specify amounts in USD and get the exact amount back regardless of BTC fluctuations, which seems close to his original premise.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    Not that close since to the user it is a BTC payment system.
    - Pyxl101 12y ago
      Why couldn't the user buy the bitcoin in dollars moments before, using the same price-stabilizing mechanism? Could an exchange engage in both operations simultaneously somehow as a sort of market-maker?

roasbeef 12y ago

Disappointed to see that they don't appear any PaymentProtocol[1] integration. [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawi...

cca 12y ago
(I work at Stripe.) We love the PaymentProtocol, and we have an integration internally. Because the protocol is fairly new, we want to gauge demand from our users before exposing the extra infrastructure.

mrb 12y ago

Stripe's Terms of Service reveal that they use Coinbase in the backend to transact and exchange the bitcoins: https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms If you are a small merchant planning to do less than $1-2 million dollars in sales, you might still prefer using Coinbase directly instead of Stripe though, because Coinbase waives all fees until the first $1 million dollars (then it's 1%), but Stripe charges a constant 0.5% fee. There is a tad more info from https://twitter.com/stripe https://twitter.com/stripe : "Our Bitcoin support is now fully live: https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin ." "It's fully-integrated with the rest of Stripe: same APIs, same reporting, same dashboard. (Just like our Alipay support.)" "While testing our Bitcoin support, we had people from 60 different countries use it to pay. (Howdy, Guatemala, Algeria, Rwanda, Cambodia!)" "Particular thanks to @Namecheap, @Tarsnap, @HandUp, and @Grooveshark for their feedback as we developed this." "And as for https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin itself -- this is our first, but hopefully not last, page to feature an animated Vim." For the record, Stripe's Bitcoin support has been in beta since March 2014. Tarsnap were the first users: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.h... Edit: @ThrustVectoring: it does not take 5 weeks of a developer's time to integrate with Coinbase, especially for the "small" merchants (<$1-2M in sales) that my comment was written for. But I agree the appeal of simplicity if you already take Stripe is there :)

ThrustVectoring 12y ago
In favor of Stripe: developers cost at least $2k/week, and .5% of $2MM is $10k. Ease of integration can easily dominate transaction fees.
vertex-four 12y ago
You can integrate bitcoin support into Stripe Checkout with just a few lines of code - one attribute on the client, and 2-3 lines of extra code to create your Charge object in a different way on the server, at which point you process it in almost exactly the same way as a card payment (potentially minus some UI details in confirmation messages, etc). Integrating Coinbase involves writing your own "payment" abstraction in place of being able to use Stripe's all the way through your application, then implementing both Stripe and Coinbase on top of that. While this might be good in the long run (so you can switch off of Stripe easily), it's not so good for smaller shops/services which don't need that complexity yet.

yellowapple 12y ago

Is there a way to just accept Bitcoin using this without automatically converting it into a fiat currency? That would make this complete for me.

lbotos 12y ago

Any idea how stripe is handling confirmations? (I'm a bitcoin newbie, but I know that consensus took a minute or so the last time I had done anything with BTC.) Has that changed?

cca 12y ago
(Christian from Stripe here.) We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed. The time-delay between when the customer pushes the transaction and when we notify our users is typically less than 15 seconds and almost always less than 60 seconds.
- Shank 12y ago
  Has the technology changed/evolved enough that that's credible? I was under the impression that it wasn't "fully confirmed" by the network until a new block was mined, or you could have double spend attacks?
  - sfeng 12y ago
    Credit card fraud protection often relies on heuristics, perhaps they are doing a similar thing here.
- veryluckyxyz 12y ago
  > We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed. Can you please elaborate?
  - NeutronBoy 12y ago
    Really the key question is: if a transaction that you believe will become confirmed, turns out to be invalid, who wears that? Stripe, or me? Will Stripe eat that, or will I get hit with the difference?
- sah88 12y ago
  What happens if it does not get confirmed. Do you debit the account by an equivalent amount or eat it?

clamprecht 12y ago

Does it allow bitcoin-paid monthly subscriptions?

krithix 12y ago
Stripe doesn't currently support recurring or repeated payments with Bitcoin—the receivers can only be used for a single payment.

veryluckyxyz 12y ago

Can someone tell how Stripe (or other providers) guarantee immunity from price fluctuations?

nate_martin 12y ago
Merchant sets their price in dollars (for example) and the price in Bitcoin is calculated when a transaction is made using the current btc exchange rate.
- veryluckyxyz 12y ago
  Stripe (in this case) receives bitcoins and it is exposed to fluctuations. So, if Stripe guarantees the seller a price for the bitcoin, I would think that Stripe has a mechanism to limit or even eliminate the risk from that exposure. I am interested in learning how Stripe does it. Do you know how Stripe does it?
  - aet 12y ago
    Can they do the conversion realtime and charge the client whatever rate they get?
    - veryluckyxyz 12y ago
      Perhaps, but they don't say it explicitly. For example, Bitpay says (at https://bitpay.com/ https://bitpay.com/) ` Charge $1, get $1 Instant conversion, no transaction fee, and bank deposits in US Dollars, Euros, GBP, CAD and more. We take the bitcoin exchange rate risk, your customers get the best rate on the market, and you get a payment you can count on, every time. `
  - joosters 12y ago
    Maybe they just hope that the fluctuations will balance out?

borski 12y ago

I'm assuming this doesn't work for recurring payments?

krithix 12y ago
(I work for Stripe.) That's correct. Stripe does not currently support recurring or repeated payments with Bitcoin. The receivers can only be used for a single payment.
- undefined0 12y ago
  Since you could now be considered 'big leaders' in the bitcoin world. You really should lobby for a BIP70 specification which allows for wallets to subscribe people to payments. However, then would be the question of how can both the wallet provider and Stripe agree on the exchange rate. In short, I'd like to see BIP70 become like PayPal's IPN, so it can notify websites of subscriptions, refunds, payment requests, instant payment confirmation from a trusted third party (Coinbase would be considered trusted to tell us a payments been instantly recieved without having to wait for confirmation), etc. I've have these ideas for a while but I'm not known in the bitcoin space so my comments don't make any impact. Stripe could considering thinking about such specifications, I hope?
  - aaxe 12y ago
    Paypal's IPN is the worst piece of garbage ever.

ericfrederich 12y ago

Too bad BitCoin isn't default and more of an opt-out kind of thing. Eventually...

lisa_henderson 12y ago

The Bitcoin community might want to take a deep breath and recognize where Bitcoin has the most real-world use. The idea that my mom will someday use Bitcoin to buy books online is about as realistic as the belief that, any minute now, youngsters will realize that the daily newspaper is better read in paper form, because of the texture and experience and the anonymity of paper. For that matter, I am a computer programmer, and I love to play with new technologies, and I'm utterly unable to imagine why I'd ever want to pay with anything with Bitcoin. There are a large number of people living in China who would like to get around the nation's currency controls. There are a large number of people living in Russia that want to move money without being tracked. There are a large number of people living in Latin America who want to avoid taxes in their own countries. This is what drives the use of Bitcoin. The only large scale need for Bitcoin is criminal activity, in China, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere. Currency regulated by the government is a classic "good enough" product. It might lack some features that would be nice, but 99% of the public doesn't seem to care. Rather, they want more money, but they don't want to change money. If they had real doubts about the currency, they would dump it in exchange for real goods. But instead, most people work hard to acquire more money, and they show no real concern with the standard proxies for currency (credit cards, checks, etc).

bhayden 12y ago
The appeal of bitcoin to me, a regular American, is much the same appeal that using a VPN, having encrypted hard drives, and not sharing information about myself all over social media does. There is very little ability to have privacy when paying with USD. You can have cash transactions, in real life, or send money orders through the mail. That's pretty much it. I want privacy in my spending and in my assets. If I like reading about hacking and buy an eBook about it, I don't want that to be evidence against me when law enforcement comes knocking and tries to trump up charges against (see HN post about this just today). If I buy a VPN service, I don't want to become a target for surveillance. There are tons of legitimate, legal reasons to want privacy in purchasing and assets.
- amalcon 12y ago
  Publishing your entire transaction history for the entire world to see doesn't seem like the best way to have privacy, even if it is under a pseudonym. After all, purchasing history seems like one of the best tools to trace a pseudonym.

Animats 12y ago

"Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars." Looks like another Coinbase reseller. Coinbase has a merchant program. They guarantee their buy price of Bitcoin for a minute or two, to cover the volatility between when the web site accepts the Bitcoins and Coinbase dumps them on an exchange. During periods of high volatility, this service is sometimes suspended. Many shopping cart programs already accept Bitcoins and convert them through Coinbase. Few merchants accept Bitcoins and accept the conversion risk themselves. This kind of service has been available for the last year. It's used a little, but not much.

curiously 12y ago

I just don't think this is useful unless you were offering a service that only works with bitcoins. The wide adoption won't change Bitcoin, it's the unpredictable and manipulative market pricing that makes me hesitant to accept it. With USD you know that if you got 100 it won't turn into $10 in a few weeks but the reality with bitcoin is that the threat exists

chris_va 12y ago

Question for Stripe folks. At creation, Stripe guarantees an exchange rate that is usable for 10 minutes. If the customer sends bitcoin to the receiver after the 10 minutes have expired, we’ll still process the transaction but the conversion amount will no longer be guaranteed. Say I am a merchant, and I want to make $10 on my transaction. With a 0.5% fee: - Without BTC, I charge $10.05 to the user, you take 5 cents, and I am left with $10. - With BTC, I charge $10.05 to stripe, which gets converted to BTC at some exchange rate, and gets charged to the user. Does Stripe guarantee me $10? Or am I subject to the fluctuations of Stripe's exchange rate (say the user takes 20 minutes to finish the transaction)? Is there any way to guarantee that I get paid $10 or the transaction fails?

gigq 12y ago
I don't know the answer to this but given the user is the one who didn't complete the transaction in 10 minutes they are probably held responsible. I would guess if it was underpaid they would have to send more to the address (the same as if they only paid half the bill). If it's overpaid they probably send the overpaid amount back as a refund to the address it was sent from (or keep it).
- joshstrange 12y ago
  It would be interesting to see if you could "lock in" a BTC price and then wait 9 minutes to see if BTC goes up or down (meaning you are over/under paying) then decide if you still want to buy. I'd think there would be protections against something like this though.

MMateus 12y ago

Great news! I wish Stripe can be available in more countries soon.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

RemoteWorker 12y ago

I find it hilarious how Bitcoin haters (like the ones we have here on HN) say it's never going to work, but then they spend hours every day trying to talk people out of using it.

lmm 12y ago
The value of these things is a Keynesian beauty contest. If enough people decide that Bitcoin is a valid currency then it is a valid currency (just like baseball cards). I think that would be bad for society. Any new value in the bitcoin ecosystem increases the value held by the early adopters - who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals, and the rest are the miners who enabled them. (bitcoin does have some advantages for some legitimate use cases, but the biggest advantages were for the criminal use cases).
- RemoteWorker 12y ago
  Think of the children!
- venaoy 12y ago
  > who are mostly drug dealers or other criminals This is false. And you have no source to prove it. I know a lot of early adopters through various channels. They are geeks, crypto nerds, cypherpunks. Think guys like Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. Nice guys who like to explore new ideas. Maybe you are just upset that you "missed the boat" on bitcoin or something. But you've got to stop believing every Bitcoin user is a criminal.
al2o3cr 12y ago
I find it hilarious how Bitcoin cheerleaders say there aren't any downsides, and then spend hours every day posting "chargebacks aren't important" and "merchants will obviously pass all the savings on to consumers". YMMV.
- RemoteWorker 12y ago
  What do chargebacks have to do with a currency? Chargebacks is something offered by services built on top of the currency, not the currency itself. Else tell me how to chargeback USD bills. If you think chargebacks are the most important thing mentioning when attacking Bitcoin, then it seems like it does have a bright future.

logicallee 12y ago

why do we - normal people - want to handle a currency free of any legal oversight or reversibility/traceability even in the case of outright theft? see this story of ours just from the past month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053621 they know exactly who did it and why/how it happened... what advantage is there to the coins themselves being completely untraceable, transactions completely irreversible? suppose your net worth is largely a matter of the value of your startup at its last valuation. would you prefer to just have that many hundred thousand dollars in cash in your home? But with the added benefit that it can disappear at a distance without anyone visiting your home? Bitcoin is great but isn't it about time to put a sane banking layer on top of it? Note: like all sane people I believe in a mix of government oversight and personal freedom, maybe 90% the latter. But having an untraceable currency doesn't make me any more free. Unlike every tech luminary, Satoshi can't even identify himself.

Karunamon 12y ago
Because legal oversight and traceability are often bugs, not features. The middlemen required to deal with those two things are often bloated, slow to react, corrupt, expensive, and in some cases, all of the above. The idea that "I want to send some value to someone else" requires jumping through so many hoops, and having so many bites taken out of it, in 2015, is a bit silly. How do chargebacks work with cash? Exactly. Yet we still use it. This honestly smells like the government anti-encryption argument. "You have nothing to hide, so why do so?"

stefanobernardi 12y ago

By enabling BTC payments, does this mean that Stripe will change the list of "prohibited" uses? That list is in line with what are usually high-risk card transactions, but by removing that risk (almost) entirely, it seems like this could finally enable a wave of new commerce on diverse and neglected categories. I'm probably assuming a no as they'll want to keep the card AND bitcoin and not do jut BTC, but a man can dream.

espeed 12y ago
The Stripe TOS says: "Most Prohibited Business categories are imposed by Card Network rules or the requirements of our banking providers or processors" (https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses). Bitcoin avoids much of the high-risk card issues so will Stripe update its Bitcoin TOS to allow more high-risk transactions and regulated industries?

brosky117 12y ago

I'm not really into front-end but man...that page was beautifully executed.

thucydides 12y ago

Who wants to use this most? Porn companies. Their chargeback rates are obscenely high. And Bitcoins can't be "clawed back," as grubles put it. ed: "wants to" instead of "will"

haakon 12y ago
Except Stripe doesn't service pornography businesses. (Source: https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses)
undefined0 12y ago
"Their chargeback rates are obscenely high". I've always understood that porn companies have difficulty finding a friendly payment processor, but I've never heard that they recieve a high chargeback rate before. Do you know why that is? What do users gain from chargebacking porn websites over chargebacking dropbox, for example?
- sanswork 12y ago
  Their partner sees "XYZ.com" on the bill and goes to look it up. "Why are you buying porn?" "Oh that wasn't me! Someone must have stolen our card" and they submit a chargeback.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    I'm sure regret is also a part of it as well. "Why did I spend that money?" And of course, outright theft of services, where they watch/download whatever it is they're interested in and then cancel the charge.
- iopq 12y ago
  Because the porn site says "free for 3 days" and of course nobody remembers to actually cancel the subscription after 3 days. When they get the bill a month later they say "I never bought a full subscription!" and they cancel. It's a cat and mouse game. If customers KNEW they couldn't keep getting charged they'd gladly pay $1 to watch for one day. $1 is STILL going to have $0.05 fee, not $0.35 or whatever the CC processor would charge for such a small transaction.

TomAnthony 12y ago

Interesting that Stripe invested in Stellar (https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar) which I couldn't help think of as a 'Bitcoin competitor'. It makes sense that they still increase support for the more established/famous cryptocurrency that is Bitcoin but I thought they would still be interested in somehow relating this to Stellar.

pugz 12y ago

This is fantastic. However, I couldn't see any mention of a Bitcoin-specific minimum charge. Is it still 50c as per Stripe's existing documentation[1]? [1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/smallest-amount-to-charge https://support.stripe.com/questions/smallest-amount-to-char...

runeks 12y ago
I'd really like to see this question answered as well. Also, I'd really like to know: is the credit card fee still ~2.5% if I receive 50 cents USD using credit card via Stripe? Or is there an additional, flat rate fee?

isthisforme 12y ago

Can someone explain if a Canadian stripe merchant processing in US dollars can use this?

heathermiller 12y ago

A "how it's made" of the amazing product intro/page would be a very nice read!!

hippich 12y ago

What customer loose when paying with bitcoin - protection. On the other hand when customer pays with credit card, merchant essentially do not have protection. But merchants cover that by increasing price to cover accidental fraud. Therefore merchants should lower price by 2-3% (credit card processing fees) + 5%-25% (not sure about exact amount) to cover lost protection by customer and gained protection for business. When this happen, I bet there will be some people who will be alright getting better price in exchange for loss of some protections. Otherwise it doesn't make sense now to not use credit card.

diaz 12y ago

I'd never thought I'd read so many comments about people questioning whether using Bitcoins to buy anything is useful or not or even if people would use. Specially in a place like this with so many technology aware people. Giving more choices for payment is good. Sellers are including more people that can pay for their services/products. If nobody buys anything with bitcoin they lose nothing and business goes as usual. Simple. Please get out of your bubbles and think a little more if you can't find scenarios where people would use Bitcoins rather than money. In my case If I start seeing more places accepting Bitcoins it's only more probable that I'll use it and put more money in my wallet for that. I can remember of two places I could use Bitcoins right now: Humble Bundles and Namecheap. Given the choice and more sellers using it I will use that option more and more. Some of the credit card scenarios people are talking is again US specific. If I want to pay for something quick and simple online I have to get really out of my way to do it. I don't have credit cards and lots and lots of people don't have them and avoid them. I don't want to have one ever. Currently for me to pay anything online I have to go to MBNet to create a virtual credit card for each purchase I want to do. That card is valid for one purchase only and for a single shop/seller. There's another option where I can create a virtual card valid for one year but I can only use it in the same seller/shop. Only after that can I use all those payments systems on the internet. If I want to be protected with Paypal I have to add and remove a card each time I need to use it. So lately I just input the virtual credit card info where sellers ask in their forms and don't even care about paypal or amazon or anything else. Basically I don't really have much of any kind of protection anyway doing all this work above comparing to the simple use case of having bitcoins and just directly giving you the money without caring anymore. Plus I don't have to keep looking at my credit card looking for any suspicious transaction that the seller could at any time issue to me. I give the money exactly that I want and I can just go with my life without thinking about it anymore. And this is just my point of view. I can clearly imagine many people with very different reasons simply using Bitcoins if that option is available. Now the only thing really missing is being able to implement a simple shop using Stripe from this side of the Atlantic :P. Congratulations Stripe and keep the good work.

StavrosK 12y ago
>Now the only thing really missing is being able to implement a simple shop using Stripe from this side of the Atlantic :P. Why can't you? Stripe has supported the UK and other countries for a year or something.

TACIXAT 12y ago

Hey Stripe, are you reading this? I'm deciding between payment processors right now. I plan to have excessively low prices, in the range of 1 dollar per year. PayPal and Amazon offer micro transaction pricing at 5 cents + 5% of each transaction. Care to compete?

woowowp 12y ago
0.5% is less than 5 cents + 5%. For a $1 transaction, Paypal/Amazon would charge 10 cents and Stripe would charge 0.5 cents for a bitcoin transaction. Unless you're talking about credit card transactions.
- TACIXAT 12y ago
  I am talking about credit card transactions. I plan on accepting bitcoin, but I want to accept normal payments as well. Right now it seems like Amazon + Coinbase will be my choice.

knwang 12y ago

Congrats team Stripe! Fantastic feature as always. In our case, we promise full refund if our users are not happy with our service. Is there a way to refund customers bitcoins as easy as how it is currently with credit cards?

UXDork 12y ago

Okay, Stripe. Can I accept bitcoins and automatically convert them to USD? I need an instant conversion back to USD after the transaction so I don't lose money due to volatility. Does stripe let merchants auto-convert their Bitcoin payments to USD? This would solve the problem entirely and I'd be happy to pass the extra savings on to customers. I could probably give about a 6% discount because I wouldn't take profit from the transaction savings. In fact, given the fee is .05% of the transaction, this could be the first service to ever enable micropayments. Perfect for a lot of internet/new technology services. The key is to convert the customer's USD to bitcoin instantly, pay with bitcoin, and convert the received bitcoin back to USD instantly again.

lachyg 12y ago
(I work at Stripe) Correct! You set your price in USD, we present the amount in bitcoins to your customer, and guarantee you the price you set in USD.
sjcsjc 12y ago
I think you meant 0.5% for the fee.

diltonm 12y ago

If Stripe is doing Bitcoin then I now know to stay from and recommend others to say away from Stripe.

kanwal 12y ago

Can this be used in India ?

amelius 12y ago

Could this mean we will soon be moving towards micropayments? And perhaps less dependence on app stores?

runeks 12y ago
Now that is actually an area where bitcoin makes sense. Use Stripe to put up a payment gateway in front of articles. Just send 50 cents in bitcoin to the address that is displayed, and you can read the article instantly.

badgercapital 12y ago

Wow.. I know a few startups that just killed after this announcement.

Toadsoup 12y ago

This is great and I intend on giving it a shot to accept bitcoin in the near future. I would like to see it as an option to keep bitcoin rather than having it automatically exchanged to USD on my behalf. It would allow people to assess their own risk tolerance if they wanted to hold bitcoin or if they had other services that work well with bitcoin.