Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

Has anyone got a breakdown of the different options available to accept bitcoin in a physical store in the UK and the costs associated with them? In a physical store can the merchant just present the customer their QR code to accept payment in bitcoin free of charge?

What are the advantages of using someone like BitPay? Is it just avoiding price volatility bitcoin?

Help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I am not in UK but in my country, there are also physical shops that accept Bitcoin here and you know, using Bitcoin to pay is as convenient as paying by online wallet (with money in it), they enable us to send (or pay the bill) with one touch, scan the code and it's done, it makes our life easier

Thanks Mastadonballs.

Are there any costs associated with that to the customer or merchant though?

take a look at the bitcoin wiki section for merchants, it gives you some pretty basic but good information about what to do. there is also some additional links at the bottom which you can visit and see what each of them offer:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Merchant_Howto

another link: http://www.coindesk.com/information/bitcoin-retail-pos-systems/

Hey Ray_Ray,

BitPay's pretty useful if you don't mind paying the 1% fee that they charge.
Otherwise, create a wallet and print out a QR code to accept Bitcoins at your store. :)


Customer would have to pay the TX fee (Which is a lot these days) and you'd have to pay 1% in case of BitPay and no fee if you use the QR print-out method.

Bear in mind that all the staff need to be trained to know how to:

• Check whether the customer's transaction fees are sufficient
• Check whether the customer's transaction has been sent with RBF option exercised

Both represent a risk as to whether you get paid or not. Bitpay will handle that for you, but they're a problem in their own right, as they frequently get involved in the politics of the Bitcoin Network's future direction, strangely enough in a way that puts them more in control of it.

The best option for bricks and mortar merchants is the Lightning Network, which is actually not an option right now because of the political squabbles. It would remove the 2 issues presented above, and so the staff wouldn't all have to be quite so well trained.

I am not very sure but at this present stage in bitcoin's life, do you think anyone will be willing to use bitcoin to pay for goods bought with this high transaction fees? Would have worked a while back but now? Anyway, since all you have to pay is 1% to bitpay when someone transacts, that shouldn't be a serious issue.
This is absolutely a very innovative way to go about this.

it is good that they have been accepted bitcoin as one of the accepted currency, it is good news for us , hoping that many countries might do that as well, i think there will be no disadvantage of that perhaps it is a good news and a good for bitcoin users worldwide.

I'd be pretty amazed if you had customers willing to cough up the fees as they are unless you're selling yachts.

What do you want? Bitcoin or GBP?

Both Coinbase and Bitpay have operated as processors in the UK but I don't know how they do it as there's no banking. I assume it's some sort of EU hack like Coinbase's where you're sending GBP to an Estonian bank.

The main advantage of either is that the exchange is locked at the time of sale. If you need GBP and you're handling selling your own BTC first off your bank will probably shut you down and second you might not get to market fast enough to stave off volatility.

although it is good to train your staff properly but it is not really necessary. you just need a good app designed that does that for them. the cashier may not even know what a transaction is but he can take a look at the screen and see if it is showing him a red sign saying danger or a green sign saying things are OK.
it can be a third party like BitPay or it can be a third party like blockcypher's Confidence Factor through a simple API call [1]. i know a couple of gambling sites which are accepting 0 confirmation deposits use blockcypher and don't have any issue with it.

[1] https://www.blockcypher.com/dev/bitcoin/#confidence-factor

Even if say you find a store you yet will have to pay fees say for 10$ you need to pay 2 - 5$ fees what's good will it be. Plus then confirmation will be a big pain, now until the seller sees the coins coming and let's you take the good it's nice, but you need to think the fees that your wallet or network will charge you, secondly how much confirmation time it will take, and is the seller allows this, what are his policies, I would be bit skeptical to flaunt my Bitcoins in public but you may have other ideas.

Yes. One would have to pay the transaction fee. At the moment the average transaction fee sits at 450-satoshi/byte. I also believe that Bitpay charges an extra 1%.

The fee would be associated with the customer most likely.

You are both ignoring the trade-off with 3rd party processors like Bitpay or Coinbase: they are powerful corporate entities that meddle in Bitcoin's development to suit their own avaricious/dominance driven agendas, which is a pernicious force in a system that is supposed to have a decentralised balance of power.


And @gentlemand, what makes you so confident that a bank will ever discover a commercial customer using BTC <-> BTC or BTC <-> cash transactions? Small businesses to business-to-business cash trading all the time, it's a good way to avoid the deposit fees that banks charge to small customers.

And what makes you think that a bank will not close the account of a small business that used a Bitpay account? Under those circumstances, the information that the business is using Bitcoin as a part of their business is readily available to the bank, unlike when the business manage the BTC themselves. You've got the whole assessment entirely backwards, the perfect opposite of what you say is true.

@carltonbanks

I appreciate this viewpoint that coinbase/bitpay are both powerful corporates who are taking cut.  Which makes me question..how can a merchant accept bitcoin for free (no charge to anyone)? What is missing?

The cheapest way to accept Bitcoin would be this one:


The only expense would be the tx fee that the customer would have to pay.

And as @Carltonbanks said:

Bitcoin is a kind of business now a days and people are using it for their good profit as traders are using it to trade good amount spending is necessary for large profit and to get high profit the Bitcoin price will be increased by its usage if a merchant want to take Bitcoin free of cost of the person he/ she can steal some Bitcoin during payment I don't think it's quite easy for them they would take good profit by earning through right way instead of stealing up by taking extra amount but now it's also not easy because of online wallet it will never allow any  merchant to change extra payment.