SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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. ]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09PM
The altcoins and, to a lesser extent, the Bitcoin forks are all separate experiments. Bitcoin itself is long since over from the technical point of view. This is just the dust settling as non-technical speculators are getting tulipmania. Eventually a government will pick some characteristics from the available pool of choices and launch their own digital currency. Odds are when that happens it will neither be anonymous nor distributed. China is one of the more likely sources though I think they will leverage Tencent and Alibaba to bootstrap the market. Of course it goes with out saying that it will also be somehow tied to their Citizen Score.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.