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Stripe is Dropping Bitcoin Support

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:43AM   
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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Original Submission

• Re:payment system versus investment system (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:48PM

  by requerdanos (5997) on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:48PM (#627746) Journal

  Bitcoin was supposed to be a payment system. See the original paper linked in the summary.

  That's a fact. Yes, it was. It achieved no more than moderate success as such.

  with high transaction fees and intolerable delays in confirmation, it cannot be.

  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:

  Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)

  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.

  What you are seeing right now is not payment but speculation. Ditigal pogs or beaniebabies.

  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.

  Parent

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