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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.