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: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:48AM (11 children)
I am not sure the one follows the other.
Yes, it's a bad sign if Stripe drops you, but the "Bitcoin experiment" has a market cap of almost 200 billion dollars. With a "B."
The does-not-scale transaction feature is unfortunate, contributing to the recent "bitcoin split," but however awe-inspiring the suck factor is there, Bitcoin still has its uses, such as allowing people living under hyperinflationary currencies to hold on to some of their money instead of conveniently having it automatically disappear.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:58AM (4 children)
You are probably multiplying all the supply of BTC to the coin price. This is not the market cap. This value is not even applicable, as you cannot separate shares outstanding and treasure shares. Here is an analogy that explains what BTC looks like.
Print 17 million pieces of cut paper. Call them coins. Sell 1,000 of those coins - perhaps, to yourself - for $10K each. Then declare that you are a multibillionaire, as your "market cap" is $170B. Is it really so? How would you go about, say, buying the Trump Tower? At what point it is good to notice that nobody else wants your cut paper? Why then it would be different with cut numbers?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:16AM (1 child)
Maybe you are confusing the definition with the meaning. The definition of market cap is precisely the price of the last unit traded (the smallest possible fraction of a bitcoin, a single share, a euro cent, ...) times the number of existing units. You convincingly explain that the there might be little meaning to market cap in some cases, OTOH it is of use in many other cases (also in the Bitcoin case). The pro tip here is: also take into account volume.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:24PM
(Score: 2) by hoeferbe on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
Your analogy breaks down due to a simple point. There is no 1 human that controls all the bitcoin. The ~16.8 million bitcoin in circulation, as of 2018-01-23, [blockchain.info] are spread out among as many as possibly 10 million people [btcnn.com]. So, a single person does not just set an arbitrary price and thus declare the market capitalization.
The price of bitcoin is determined by the market -- by those ~10 million people and newcomers wanting to purchase or divest themselves of bitcoin. If nobody wanted bitcoin, then the price would go down to $0/BTC. But as it stands, the market has collectively determined bitcoin to be worth $11,282/BTC as of 2018-01-23 [blockchain.info], thus having a market cap of ~16.8E6 BTC * $11,282/BTC = ~$189.5 billion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:45PM
No, tftp is correct, albeit overstating things.
The problem is that prices of almost everything is inherently unstable, and the act of selling anything causes the price to drop a bit. If you have a massive and robust market, that price difference it is typically not a big deal. For example, if $50M worth of Walmart stock were to be sold by a hedge fund, it would only slightly blip in the price. However, if $50M worth of bitcoin were to suddenly be sold, there would be a major impact on the list price of bitcoins.
tftp was only exaggerating in his example, by noting that the list price of bitcoins is not the price that they could all be sold at. A better analogy, albeit more technical and esoteric, is saying that you own 100M shares in a thinly-traded penny stock. Technically that would make you a multi-millionaire... but if you tried to cash out you'd quickly find out that you only have a few thousand dollars of real-cash.
Bitcoin's market capitalization may be ~$189.5 billion... but that's a dramatic exaggeration of the real cash money floating around the system.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:19AM (5 children)
Bitcoin was supposed to be a payment system. See the original paper linked in the summary. However, with high transaction fees and intolerable delays in confirmation, it cannot be. What you are seeing right now is not payment but speculation. Ditigal pogs or beaniebabies.
I should have written more because the experiment with Bitcoin was over a few years ago. The technology was tested and worked, but the workflow needs a lot of tweaking. It's now just an exeriment that escaped the lab.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:30AM (1 child)
The experiment is happening now, in front of everyone. Many attemps to solve the issues are attempted by the altcoins and forks, as well as a healthy share of scams. Bitcoin Cash has sub-dollar transaction fees, as does like coin, last time I checked. RaiBlocks and IOTA are trying to handle the ledger size problem,. Ripple and Stellar are trying to be the opposite, centrally controlled and appealing to traditional institutions. Whether speculation is ruining this or bring needed stress testing is up to interpretation.
(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.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:48PM
That's a fact. Yes, it was. It achieved no more than moderate success as such.
Bitcoin is now not a good payment system--that's a fact. As Stripe observes in dropping it as a payment method. Stripe also says the following:
Which is similar to what I said above about Bitcoin being good for things different than payment, in its non-experiment-death. You'll know the Bitcoin experiment is over if/when its value falls to less than what it costs to exchange it for some other medium. That's not what's happening. The real, tangible market cap (total units times value of each, look it up) is above zero by hundreds of billions of Dollars, to name one measure. This tells us that people are willing to pay in other currencies for Bitcoin, which is the thing that gives it practical, non-theoretical value.
That's an opinion, and perhaps an insightful one, but certainly not a fact. Believing this so strongly as you do, I think you should short-sell as many Bitcoin as you can possibly cover. Can't lose*.
Any currency not backed by a correspondence to something relatively fixed in value (gold, for example) is worth what people want to pay for it. That puts Bitcoin on the level of imaginary cut-pieces-of-paper fiat currency such as the U.S. Dollar. That's fine and all, but does not mean "the experiment is over."
To summarize: Bitcoin sucks as a payment method. So badly that Stripe is dropping it. But Bitcoin still holds its value.
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* When you hear "can't lose" about a financial speculation transaction, it's usually best to back slowly away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
no, just quit being so ignorant and dismissive. BTC is just one project and you damn well know it. distributed ledger/acyclical graph tech is a majorly disruptive technology. save your FUD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:44PM
> distributed ledger/acyclical graph tech is a majorly disruptive
And you damn well know that Bitcoin is not the only distributed ledger. Just because Bitcoin is over doesn't mean that any of the others might not be of use. However, for now the field is too crowded with chaff and scams.
(Score: 2) by arcz on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:50AM (20 children)
The fact people are willing to pay $30/transaction shows that bitcoin is here to stay. Unfortunately it's priced out micropayments, for now. Lightning might help.
Another reason bitcoin wont die: As people abandon bitcoin there are less transactions, thus less transaction fees, thus more people will use bitcoin.
Basically bitcoin's value wont go up much ( because that'd cause transaction fees to go up, making people not want to use bitcoin) and also by the same token wont go down. 10-15k price here to stay? Until Lightning Network anyway.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:09AM (9 children)
What are people buying where a $30 transaction fee doesn't matter? Illicit drugs/weapons? Or just speculating on the value of Bitcoin going up?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:21AM (7 children)
Isn't this what it is mostly for? Anyone here that pays for their groceries with bitcoins? Or anything "normal" (whatever that is but lets assume its not drugs, guns, sex or anything illicit)? So it still seems that it is mostly about illicit activities, items and then for speculative purposes and if you think that something is going to increase $1000 over night then $30 isn't to much of an issue.
That said another reason is probably the wild swings in value, it's really annoying if you want to sell (or buy) things if the price value can change wildly up or down from day to day or hour to hour. Yes that can happen to normal currency to but it doesn't seem to have the wild swings associated with bitcoins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:46AM (5 children)
I was going to say SN subscriptions aren't illicit but then I thought better of it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:56AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:11PM
Agreed. That private Caribbean island ain't gonna buy itself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:56PM (2 children)
Also, fuck Earth. All it ever did was keep me down.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:00PM (1 child)
Actually it keeps you up, by hey physics is a pretty tough subject!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:01PM
Its gravity well of 11.2 km/s begs to differ.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:49PM
i pay my utility bills, gas and groceries with bitcoin (via the shift card), or sometimes just part of it. I buy stuff on newegg with BTC directly. i haven't seen $30 transaction fees. i want to say my last one was $7-10? i don't care about that because the BTC came from mined monero and i want people to accept crypto currency so i buy stuff from them with it. i've never bought anything naughty with cryptocurrency at all. I could get anything i wanted with cash anyways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:53PM
Ransomware ransom payments.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:31AM (1 child)
There are high fixed costs [theguardian.com] for running the system:
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:40PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:48AM (3 children)
For any one that still reads Cringely, today's column is about Bitcoin, here is a cutting from the middle of the column:
https://www.cringely.com/2018/01/24/prediction-4-bitcoin-crashes-booms-crashes-booms-2018-traders-figure-not-currency/ [cringely.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:47AM
That trade (though not to the degree of anonymity that Bitcoin allows for) is the primary purpose of a currency. Even a hyperinflating currency has some ability to do that.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:19AM
If Cringely doesn't even know the lingo, then his arguments probably don't hodl much water.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:11AM
Except they are not. Derivatives are derivatives *of* something, like some stock price or price of hogs. Bitcoin is not a derivative. It's even worse than VIX, as that is a measure of *something*. Bitcoin is just made up waste of time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:01AM (3 children)
Have you not noticed that this is a "people are not willing to pay $30/transaction" story?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:44AM (2 children)
If nobody were willing to pay $30/transaction, the transaction price would not be at $30.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:15PM (1 child)
If your money never leaves an exchange wallet, no actual trades need take place except on paper. Speculation, even tiny amounts of speculation, are still quite possible without incurring the currently huge fees.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:31PM
Here you go [bitbonkers.com]
(Score: 1) by cpghost on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:52PM (2 children)
Since obviously BTC was never meant to scale to so many transactions/s, I'm wondering how other coins are doing?
Personally, I'm a huge fan of CryptoNote-based coins like Monero (XMR) for many technical reasons, but I'm not sure it will scale w.r.t. the volume of transactions (even though it's quite fast right now, but than can rapidly change as soon as it gets too popular).
Maybe there's a recent academic paper comparing those currencies w.r.t. scaling?
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:53PM
it looks like they are making aeon as one solution to the scaling issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:16PM
Take a look at the bottom left here:
https://getmonero.org/design-goals/ [getmonero.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:57PM
I believe they will even convert to USD for you, if that's what you were after. I wonder what soylent's problem with accepting crypto currency directly is? Too scared of the tax man? That should make it obvious that it's time to take a stand. What's the point in a life of servitude? Or leaving a prison colony as home for the world's children? liberty or death!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:59PM
the whole point of crypto currency is to get rid of these usurious fucks. have you seen their privacy policy? they were never going to embrace crypto currency unless it was fully co-opted by bootlicking scum like them.