Stripe: Bitcoin

https://stripe.com/bitcoin

by sunils34 • 11 years ago

855 368 11 years ago

stripe.com

aakilfernandes• 11 years ago

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

Beautiful

jszymborski• 11 years ago

Wait, am I missing something or does coinbase not do this for free... or do they nab you some other way

dollaaron• 11 years ago

Coinbase is free for the first million dollars in transactions. Bitpay is free IIRC.

yincrash• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

collision3• 11 years ago

We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.

manuelflara• 11 years ago

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

benjamindc4• 11 years ago

I'm just using a tiny lib that makes things easier: https://github.com/bendc/animate Other than that, it's just vanilla js/css.

brentm• 11 years ago

It looks great. Would love to see a blog post explaining your methodology.

sergiotapia• 11 years 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!

vuldin• 11 years ago

Seeing the differences between how this performs in chromium vs firefox is a little annoying... it's one thing that chromium still does much better, for the time being I hope.

beecup• 11 years ago

Can you share a un-minified version of this? I would love to see how you are using the animate lib to do this. Using a beautifier is still to hard to read for me :/

27182818284• 11 years ago

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

collision3• 11 years 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.mediawi...

Stripe doesn't have a Bitcoin wallet for consumers.

veesahni• 11 years ago

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

jxm2622• 11 years 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.

krithix5• 11 years 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.)

isthisforme3• 11 years 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?

isthisforme3• 11 years 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.

jxm2622• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Fluctuation resistant for the seller but not the buyer.

j422• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

venaoy7• 11 years 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.

j422• 11 years ago

I think we are & will continue to see mass die-offs of the current generation of exchanges, as many were formed in a time where regulation and security were of less concern--combine that with the fact that they amass enormous amounts of untraceable value under what is essentially a single, private key, they're the ideal target.

The beauty of true P2P is that while a central authority still has the potential to compromise the network, the distributed nature at least distributes the attack surface equally. I imagine banks & security-conscious, established digital financial service providers will step in at some point to assume the role of the exchanges. It may be a step back for privacy and anonymity (sadly) but a major step forward for its legitimacy.

More importantly, the concept of interchangeability is emerging. When you find that BTC and $ transactions can be reconciled seamlessly (ie, agnostically with no logistical concern to source whether credit card, BTC, EBT, etc.) I think that P2P option may start to happen naturally. Providers like Stripe abstracting this is certainly the first step.

[edit] I would love to see what would happen if a company like Venmo that deals primarily in socail micro-transactions were to attempt a UX integration.

obulpathi• 11 years ago

Look at http://www.reversecoin.org/ Reversecoin allows transactions to be reversible within a specified period of time. Over time, I expect mechanisms like these to be build into Bitcoin itself. Disclaimer: I am the lead dev for Reversecoin.

adriancooney• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

general_failure• 11 years ago

I agree as well. The animation was way too fast for me.

patrickaljord• 11 years ago

I think the crutch now is not that it's hard to acquire bitcoins (thanks to coinbase and friends) or pay with bitcoin (thanks to stripe and friends), no, the only crutch is why should I buy bitcoins with my dollars when I can just pay with my dollars directly?

It can be useful for people who either don't have access to credit cards but have access to bitcoins, people who already have a lot of bitcoins and curious tech people.

deweller• 11 years ago

should I buy bitcoins with my dollars when I can just pay with my dollars directly?

Cheaper fees (0.5% vs 2.9%) can be potentially passed on to consumers.

And anonymity.

chuckup• 11 years ago

I don't think you need to buy them (unless you want to gamble on their value going up) - just be willing to accept them as payment in the future. As more people see they can easily spend bitcoin, they become more willing to accept it as payment, and the userbase grows (bringing more price stability, hopefully)

josu7• 11 years ago

It may not be that appealing for a dollar/euro economies, but for emerging markets where their currency is not that stable and average inflation is around 3-5% it could have great potential.

cissou• 11 years ago

Keep in mind that the merchant fee is .5% with Strip/Bitcoin. With regular credit card payment processing, the fee is something like 2.25%. The difference could be shared equally between the merchant and their customers. Life would be 1% cheaper for everyone (kind of).

AgentME• 11 years ago

no, the only crutch is why should I buy bitcoins with my dollars when I can just pay with my dollars directly?

(By dollars directly, I assume you mean by credit card or paypal.)

Credit cards and paypal come with the ability to do chargebacks which are useful if you don't fully trust whoever you're paying, but credit card companies and paypal are middlemen who must be trusted too. If I trust the company I'm giving money to more than I trust paypal to not fuck up or delay the transaction, then I'll immediately choose to use Bitcoin.

grubles8• 11 years ago

when I can just pay with my dollars directly?

Credit card transactions take something like 180 days to confirm. Within those 180 days one can issue a chargeback.

Bitcoin transactions take ~10-60 minutes (depending on the required number of confirmations) and cannot be clawed back.

loceng4• 11 years ago

The problem with Bitcoin though is it isn't a currency. If it was a currency, if $1 USD was paid for a Bitcoin, that USD would be destroyed, not pocketed. The only people promoting Bitcoin are those who have something massive to gain, e.g. they own a lot of Bitcoin or they have vested interest in the ecosystem. Stripe facilitating this would allow them to start gathering Bitcoin, at a rate of .5% per transaction, and if perhaps will have the impact of increasing Bitcoin's value - further increasing the value of Bitcoin they own.

skulquake• 11 years ago

There are 2.5 billion people in the world who do not have access to modern banking abilities vs. the 1 billion or so who do.

mikekchar3• 11 years ago

This is potentially amazing for me. I just started a consulting business in Japan. Credit cards are hard to come by, especially for foreigners. I need to pay for various services: domain name registration, etc, etc. At the moment I'm constrained to using Japanese companies who will accept bank transfer payments. If this becomes popular, I could buy services anywhere. There service fees are very reasonable. This is what I have been waiting for with Bitcoin (and wondering if it would ever emerge).

conception• 11 years ago

Worse are the tax implications of using large amounts of Bitcoin, since it's treated as property and not a currency. Good luck keeping track of your cost averaging over the year.

fijal• 11 years ago

or people living in a country different than the US (one problem with that is that banks/credit card companies take a MAJOR hit on the exchange rate that's very hard to overcome without having bank accounts in different jurisdictions).

muyuu3• 11 years ago

I don't want to give my CC details and/or my personal information to every merchant. This usually means I either buy from fewer merchants, or pay with bitcoin if allowed. Obviously, if the merchant is going to require my info anyway then it's pointless, so it depends.

That's one of the main points about bitcoin for me. As a tool for privacy. On the surface it may seem trivial, and corporations living off mining your information will always try to pretend it's not even an issue by simply avoiding mentioning it. While at the same time push for their payment solutions as either compulsory or cheaper ("soft pressure"). But make no mistake, this is one of the most effective tools for mining your data reliably and the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc are just not going to give up on it easily. Authorities also won't give up on "follow the money" as a tool, or even snooping and hacking into your communications legally or not, inside of their jurisdiction or not. It's basically no rules for some, all the rules for you.

fluffheadsr3• 11 years ago

so that you don't have to give your CC info to companies who don't protect it and then have it stolen, so that some jack off in Texas can go buy 200 rolls of TP from wal-mart. That's enough reason. Push payments > Pull Payments

brighton36• 11 years ago

It'll soon be as seamless as a magstripe. See "The Solution" here: http://cointelegraph.com/news/113255/keeping-score-at-the-20...

ssharp• 11 years ago

While this may be helpful, I can't see it being a game-changer at all. Have retailers like NewEgg or Overstock seen any sort of drastic revenue increases or activity from accepting Bitcoin?

The problems with Bitcoin are almost entirely on the acquiring -side and not spending side. Getting a Bitcoin is a PITA and I don't think the demand from most consumers is there to overcome the pain.

The game-changer for Bitcoin will be when someone answers the question: "Why should I switch from paying with my credit card to Bitcoin?" with something compelling.

jusben1369• 11 years ago

I think Bitcoin is the Linux of payments. Everyone always talked about the potential to completely change the desktop (consumer use) but the real impact was the network/backend (Sun/NT machines) So Bitcoin is exciting to me but not as a payment method. But as a backbone it gets really interesting.

cs702• 11 years ago

Difficulty of integration is not the main thing holding back Bitcoin adoption.

The main thing holding Bitcoin from being adopted more broadly today is that many consumers who are aware of it don't think it will be adopted more broadly!

Even in the HN community (which has a high concentration of early adopters of new technology), there are a lot of folks who don't think it will be adopted more broadly, as evidenced by the comments on this thread.

nailer2• 11 years 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

foobarqux3• 11 years ago

I thought he said BTC wouldn't succeed as a payment mechanism, but might as a settlement and clearing one.

nailer2• 11 years ago

You can specify amounts in USD and get the exact amount back regardless of BTC fluctuations, which seems close to his original premise.

roasbeef• 11 years ago

Disappointed to see that they don't appear any PaymentProtocol[1] integration.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawi...

cca3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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 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 :

"Our Bitcoin support is now fully live: 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 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.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• 11 years 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-four3• 11 years 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.

gcr• 11 years ago

Why is the choice to accept bitcoins client-side? If I want to force a payment in bitcoins, I can add the attribute myself.

Some businesses have legal ramifications for accepting bitcoin or not, even if it's through Stripe. Is there a flag in your Stripe merchant account on Stripe's server to refuse bitcoins?

sagivo• 11 years ago

if you want to save i can recommend of Bitpay - no fees at all.

yellowapple• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

cca3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

veryluckyxyz4• 11 years ago

We credit USD to our user's account when we see a transaction that we believe will become confirmed.

Can you please elaborate?

sah883• 11 years ago

What happens if it does not get confirmed. Do you debit the account by an equivalent amount or eat it?

clamprecht• 11 years ago

Does it allow bitcoin-paid monthly subscriptions?

krithix5• 11 years ago

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

veryluckyxyz4• 11 years ago

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

nate_martin• 11 years 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.

veryluckyxyz4• 11 years 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?

borski• 11 years ago

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

krithix5• 11 years 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.

undefined02• 11 years 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?

ericfrederich• 11 years ago

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

lisa_henderson• 11 years 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).

bhayden2• 11 years 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.

amalcon3• 11 years 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.

drcode• 11 years ago

I disagree somwhat- We're slowly moving into a new economy where the distinction between buyers and sellers is blurring: Instead of everyone making their purchases from a few megacorp sellers, the future will be one where any person may have a small shop or sell a small product with a small unit price (maybe even your mom someday.)

In that type of environment, it is helpful to have a payment system that is more "seller-friendly" than what we have now, since the sellers no longer have economies of scale to offset sale-side costs. Cryptocurrencies hold the promise fill the role of these "seller-friendly" currencies, since they allow anyone to accept payments without intermediaries and by merely tacking some minimal logic to their software stack of choice... though I agree they still have a long way to go to achieving this.

aioprisan2• 11 years ago

How is that creating a blur between buyers and sellers? We've always had small businesses and will continue to have both small businesses and large corporations. I don't understand the small unit price correlation to a small business. The 1-2% savings in processing fees right now are heavily offset by the instability of the currency. Not being able to plan your cost of goods sold and having predictable formulas for this will kill a business a heck of a lot more than an extra percentage point for processing via convenient electronic payments.

smokeyj• 11 years ago

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

Your mom probably didn't push for the adoption of email yet here it is (sorry usps). The advantages of faster cheaper easier don't require much convincing, especially in the case of money/contracts/assets.

The idea that people will adopt antiquated technologies when better alternatives exist is paradoxical, which makes your analogy especially confusing. Government currency is the antiquated technology, not bitcoin.

For those remittance services you point to, they need market depth in order to operate. Sure the underground market can provide some, but merchant adoption sure isn't going to hurt.

etchalon2• 11 years ago

Bitcoin is none of these things: faster cheaper easier.

venaoy7• 11 years ago

The world's simplest reasons why you might pay something using bitcoins is simply when this is the only way, or cheapest way, or safest way to make a transaction.

Example #1: some merchants are hit really hard with fraud, such as intangible goods paid by international credit card transactions. So hard that they decided to stop selling internationally. These merchants discover that Bitcoin re-enables them to sell internationally because Bitcoin completely solves the fraud problem for them (since transactions are irreversible). In that case, as an international customer of such a merchant, paying in Bitcoin is your only option.

Example #2: some merchants offer discounts when paying in Bitcoin (because they don't incur credit card fees). So it is in your interest to pay in Bitcoin: you don't have to pay the fees from exchanging coins for fiat, and you don't have to pay the indirect credit card fees that the merchant would make you cover (via the absence of a discount).

Example #3: as Bicoin's adoption grows, more and more people end up having bitcoins in their hands, like your nephew giving you $50 worth of coins for Christmas. What's the easiest for you to use them? Setting up an account at an exchange (and incurring the associated hassles and fees when selling), or just spending them directly? Of course in this case you would want to spend them directly.

Example #4: say you are travelling out of town and paying for a meal in a restaurant that you suspect might be skimming credit cards... do you pay using a credit card or bitcoins? Using Bitcoin here would be much safer. It has all the advantages of credit cards (and more) without the inconvenience and danger of handling cash (losing it, getting robbed, no ability to "back up" cash, etc). Hardware bitcoin wallets have especially an insane opportunity to innovate in this space (wrt. security and ease of use).

StavrosK4• 11 years ago

It took me no less than one hour to pay for a flight the other day, because of various cc-related problems, not the least of which being the train wreck that is Verified by Visa. I so, so wished for a Bitcoin option...

Perseids• 11 years ago

Extending example #1: Buyer anonymity enables customers to circumvent pesky geolocation restrictions on digital goods. As a personal example I've finally found an online shop that sells audiobooks without DRM, only to realize later that most of their catalog is exclusively available in the US. With bitcoin I could have just used a proxy and be done with it.

emodendroket3• 11 years ago

Unless I'm buying from my own family or something I'm not forfeiting the right to reverse a transaction if I do not get the goods I paid for just to earn a small discount.

bduerst9• 11 years ago

Hmmm, some of these hypotheticals are wishful thinking.

For example 1, it's a double edged sword. As a seller, no international chargebacks sounds like a wet dream! As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver?

Example 2 seems legit for now. If and when bitcoin becomes more mainstream, you'll see an increased transactional cost from overhead and risk mitigation, so the transactional savings will probably not always be there.

Since we don't gift each other bitcoins, Example 3 isn't a problem.

Example 4 is laughable because in the last week, four Bitcoin exchanges were hacked (or robbed by the owners - still TBD) and people who had their coins in those exchanges lost it all.

Skimming CC numbers is for sure an issue for credit cards, but as someone who has had their credit card skimmed, my issuer locked my account within 2 hours of fraudulent activity, called me, and eventually gave me my money back. How many Mt. Gox users got their money back?

celticninja6• 11 years ago

i think it is most likely to be successful not as a consumer level product but at an infrastructure level. businesses will exploit the blockchain and end users will be using it without realising it, so moneygram and western union will use it to send money for you, you wont know, you will be sending euros, dollars, shekels, whatever but you benefit from lower transaction costs, say half of what WU currently charge but for WU they would be making more per transaction as a result of leveraging the blockchain and low cost bitcoin transactions.

iopq6• 11 years ago

That's like saying "nobody will give up newspapers to use this Internet thing to get their news". Yet here we are.

Animats• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

RemoteWorker3• 11 years 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.

lmm12• 11 years 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).

RemoteWorker3• 11 years ago

Think of the children!

venaoy7• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

RemoteWorker3• 11 years 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.

CompanyLaser• 11 years ago

The bitcoin community is tremendously ignorant of critical social theory and proud of it, which is a cause of concern. Some people care about more than themselves believe it or not.

logicallee• 11 years 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

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.

Karunamon2• 11 years 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?"

brosky117• 11 years ago

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

thucydides• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Except Stripe doesn't service pornography businesses. (Source: https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses)

undefined02• 11 years 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?

sanswork3• 11 years 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.

iopq6• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Interesting that Stripe invested in 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• 11 years 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-char...

runeks4• 11 years 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?

stefanobernardi• 11 years 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• 11 years 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).

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?

isthisforme3• 11 years ago

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

heathermiller• 11 years ago

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

hippich• 11 years 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.

diaz2• 11 years 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.

StavrosK4• 11 years 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.

diaz2• 11 years ago

Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, France...?

Only thing I know is that it was in beta around some countries.

TACIXAT2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

TACIXAT2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I think you meant 0.5% for the fee.

diltonm• 11 years ago

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

kanwal• 11 years ago

Can this be used in India ?

amelius• 11 years ago

Could this mean we will soon be moving towards micropayments?

And perhaps less dependence on app stores?

runeks4• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

Toadsoup• 11 years 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

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