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Stripe is Dropping Bitcoin Support

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the and-so-it-goes dept.

canopic jug writes:

The payment service, Stripe, has ended its support for Bitcoin due to rising transaction fees and long confirmation times. Particularly the latter contribute to failed transfers. So Bitcoin is over as an experiment, and more are realizing that. However, the expectation is that some other cryptocurrency will become widely used, eventually.

Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.

Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future.

[ TMB Note: Yes, this will absolutely break our ability to accept BitCoin. Again. Which is fine this time as BitCoin transaction fees are now as high as the minimum price for a year's subscription. If you have a preferred alternative that we can accept without actually touching cryptocurrency, drop the info in a comment. ]

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:31AM (1 child)

    by tftp (806) on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:31AM (#627503) Homepage

    Another reason bitcoin wont die: As people abandon bitcoin there are less transactions, thus less transaction fees, thus more people will use bitcoin.

    There are high fixed costs [theguardian.com] for running the system:

    In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.

    Who is going to pay for all this? Answer: the last remaining bitcoiners. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are not rich enough to pay for the service. It is already obvious that the BTC cannot compete with very efficient and infinitely scalable banking services. Yes, it remains viable in poor countries - but come on, the transfer may cost more than their monthly income! BTC today is a currency only for rich speculators and criminals.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:40PM (#627740)

    Isn't that only because the value of bitcoin is high so there are a lot of miners? If value falls, number of miners drops, so does the block difficulty, and therefore the cost of running the network. If all of the miners stopped overnight, you could run the entire network from a single desktop.