OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor

by gurjeet • 8 hours ago

105 86 8 hours ago

Hasz• 7 hours ago

Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.

For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken

nohell5• 7 hours ago

Monero is even cheaper and more useful as cadh because it's private. Anyone can see Bitcoin history and where the user got their coins.

dfish6• 7 hours ago

They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle. It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.

agalush• 3 hours ago

Lightning payments are not stored onchain and have already been proved more private than monero payments

Anon1096• 7 hours ago

I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).

AnthonyMouse• 1 hour ago

for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors

This has the default inverted.

The best place for the traditional payments system is when you're making a large purchase from a questionable seller, and then you're willing to pay extra for the assurance that you can reverse the transaction.

If you're making a small purchase or buying from someone you regularly do business with, why would you want the cost of other customers' chargeback fraud or use of stolen cards to be added to the price you pay?

jcfrei• 6 hours ago

lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.

w4yai• 7 hours ago

Glad to see such initiative on bitcoin !

mikelovenotwar• 7 hours ago

Broken link on the pricing page "How did we calculate this number " -> https://help.opennode.com/en/articles/3179796-where-are-open... -> "Uh oh. That page doesn’t exist. Try searching for your answer or just send us a message."

samantha-wiki• 7 hours ago

Is it open source? If not, why choose the name “OpenNode”?

askonomm• 7 hours ago

Just like how OpenAI is open source.

giancarlostoro• 7 hours ago

Open as in "The door is open come in and give us your money"

pelagicAustral• 7 hours ago

OpenAI rings a bell

Retr0id2• 7 hours ago

"Open as in wallet"

iamsaitam• 7 hours ago

Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)

a3w• 7 hours ago

So, OpenAI is certainly never trademarked? /s

gosub100• 6 hours ago

Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering

octocop• 7 hours ago

Looks solid

jdw64• 7 hours ago

American-style words are really hard these days. I thought 'open' meant source code is available, but at some point, starting with OpenAI, it seems like 'open' has come to mean 'we'll open your wallet.

repelsteeltje• 7 hours ago

The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.

jrm42• 7 hours ago

Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.

Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.

kube-system3• 5 hours ago

And that isn't even the original meaning either! "open source" in reference to software was itself a term stolen from the intelligence community.

"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.

mothballed4• 7 hours ago

If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.

dfish6• 7 hours ago

It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.

The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.

aantix• 7 hours ago

Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases?

The buying power is all over the place.

mothballed4• 7 hours ago

This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.

Retr0id2• 7 hours ago

afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?

stymaar4• 7 hours ago

This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…

tenuousemphasis• 7 hours ago

Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.

dfish6• 7 hours ago

Someone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries. Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system. Or both.

BeetleB• 4 hours ago

People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.

OJFord• 3 hours ago

Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.

dewey• 4 hours ago

I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:

- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops

- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard

- People from countries with active sanctions against.

varispeed• 2 hours ago

with active sanctions against.

Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?

charcircuit3• 7 hours ago

Bitcoin - the only legitimate cryptocurrency secure enough for transacting at scale.

I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.

dfish6• 7 hours ago

Stablecoins can be censored. You deposited into Huobi 5 years ago? Banned. Now we keep your stablecoins, thanks for playing.

You can't censor Bitcoin.

nohell5• 7 hours ago

As a Chinese person I can confirm. Monero is the way.

charcircuit3• 6 hours ago

You can't censor Bitcoin.

Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.

nohell5• 7 hours ago

Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging

charcircuit3• 6 hours ago

DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.

pixelatedindex• 7 hours ago

I’m a little confused by the fees. In their pricing page (https://opennode.com/pricing) it says:

You request $100, the customer pays 0.00152 BTC, and then you get $99.

But 0.00152 BTC is almost $100? If I’m a business why would I pay $100 in BTC fees for a $100 transaction?

What is this solving? I’ll never understand crypto.

Edit: nvm I’m dumdum. Will get coffee. Thanks to everyone who replied.

bastawhiz• 7 hours ago

It sounds like the fee is about $1.00: the delta between $100 and $99.

jonbwhite• 7 hours ago

You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.

dfish6• 7 hours ago

The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD

tremarley• 7 hours ago

$100 is the transaction value,it is not the cost of the transaction fees.

The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.

nohell5• 7 hours ago

Why not just accept Monero? It acts more like cash. Do you really want to leak every transaction you've ever done, every time you buy something?

Bitcoin is surveillance capitalism dream!

Cider9986• 6 hours ago

Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.

Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.

hggh4• 3 hours ago

Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments

Indeed, but fortunately, BTC was forked at the right time

simonmales3• 3 hours ago

Lightning ain't slow though.

futurecat• 7 hours ago

They've been in business for a long time and I used them when I experimented with QR code for street artists to receive tips. OpenNode is very simple to implement!

jrm42• 6 hours ago

Interesting to see that this crypto thing might still have legs, as someone who's invested a lot of time (and thankfully, not a painful amount of money) into the idea.

Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.

And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.

57016524002• 6 hours ago

not your keys, not your money.

57016524002• 6 hours ago

when we will finally have good self-hosted, open-source, BTC gateways?

simonmales3• 3 hours ago

You mean payment processing? BTCPay Server is the defacto standard I would argue.

Have used it for accepting LN transactions for years.

seany• 6 hours ago

This would be more interesting with other coins. Monero or cash come to mind

hggh4• 3 hours ago

or cash come to mind

Did you mean Bitcoin Cash?

kogasa240p• 4 hours ago

Does it support Monero?

Palmik• 3 hours ago

So, this is 'open' as in 'OpenAI', not as in 'open source'. What's the benefit of this compared to something like NOW Payments for merchants (or the myriad of alternatives)? NOW Payments supports a wide range of crypto currencies as well.

fishgoesblub• 2 hours ago

Why this instead of the opensource, well used, and trusted BTCPay that you can self-host and has 0% fees?

zdkl• 2 hours ago

I don't have much substance to add to the discussion but this kind of topic is very relevant to the GNU project Taler which aims to bring an open payment infrastructure to general use/"the market". They have significant investment and institutional interest notably from the EU and established organisations such as NLNet. I am not affiliated but figure this deserves more attention, especially in this conversation.

https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor

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