Bitcoin Forum

I have read the posts of some users on this forum who are business owners and are excited about accepting bitcoin as a payment bitcoin. The usual story is that they set up the wallet manually and customers pay directly it. Knowing that there is more to just setting up a wallet and receiving payment the business owner must be able to account for how much they got in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, invoicing, and other business related issues. Well, I did some research online and discovered that there are crypto payment providers or crypto payment gateways. (https://liquidity-provider.com/crypto-payment-providers/) These services enable businesses to accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment. A few of the many services they offer include merchant accounts, transaction processing, and invoicing management.

Would creating a wallet manually to receive payment be more advantageous than using a crypto payment provider? Could you please tell me which one you prefer and why?

I really do not know much about crypto payment providers but going through the link provided, I would say these crypto payment providers are very similar to any exchange we’ve got. They provide similar services that exchanges do. And I must admit, it’s a good business idea. But I would prefer to manually open and set up my own wallet for my business if I were to accept crypto as a payment method.

I think it depends on what yiu want to do and how. If you're accepting crypto as a way to dca into it then you're going to be more likely to pick a wallet imo. If you're wanting to just be able to accept a lot of cryptos and exchange them for a bank transfer or convert them to one crypto then a payment provider is probably preferred.

There's an extra bit to this too though because you can use both (and lots of places do) such as using a wallet or open source payment provider (self hosted) for bitcoin and using an external payment processor for other transactions.

An external payment processor might also cut down on fees or make it more expensive depending on how expensive the goods you're selling are (and if the provider has a flat fee).

Be careful about lists posted by random links. The website you shared puts bitpay as the top option for a crypto payment processor, and with my little research on it, that cannot be further from the truth and I would advise that you avoid using them.

You would be better off searching here on the forum and following discussions centered around that topic.

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About the better option, as mentioned above, it depends on what you intend to achieve through the addition of crypto as a payment option;
• If you're scared of the volatility of Bitcoin, a payment processor should be the leading option,
• If you're looking to stack up your portfolio, receiving crypto like Bitcoin through the lightening network to your personal wallet is the better option.

The truth from my own point of is that you can not get the chance to only use crypto-currency as you only form of payment because you may encounter situations where you would need to use fiat system because they don’t support crypto-currency payment gateway.

As a business owner and a crypto-currency enthusiast you should also consider you business and try to accommodate all type of customer you have by making payment with crypto-currency optional.

If a business owner wanted to have cryptocurrency as a payment option and receive fiat on the same transaction, he can opt to use payment gateways because it enables him to receive crypto payment and receive fiat immediately in exchange[1]. While if the business owner set up a wallet payment for the business manually, he only gets the crypto payment and he needs another process for converting crypto to fiat.  I say a Crypto payment gateway is more convenient if the owner does not want to be subjected to the fluctuation of cryptocurrency.


Here[1] is a good read on how Crypto Payment Gateway Work and its advantage and disadvantage over Setting up a wallet manually for business:

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[1] https://www.investopedia.com/tech/bitcoin-payment-services-introduction/#:~:text=Cryptocurrency%20gateways%20enable%20you%20to,to%20offer%20more%20payment%20options.

As a beginning to the cryptocurrency usage into business, it is good to start with the wallet to receive the payment. Payment gateway can be introduced later, by the time owner can also learn better about the usage of cryptocurrencies and it's ease of access.

Cryptocurrency usage have increased over time and the same could bring good user base into the business. Once it was a hard task to have bitcoin payment gateway. With the emergence of bitpay and other cryptocurrency service providers it had been made simple.

Probably you have to factor in how big your business is, because this payment gateway will charge you as well as being the middle man. So if you are just a small scale business, maybe it's advisable to set up everything by yourself, your bitcoin addresses, whether Segwit or LN payment. It might be tedious, but at least you will be hands on and might better understand how everything works, meaning the process starts and ends with your involvement and isn't it that is the main core of being a entrepreneur? In addition though, you should also learn how to protect your wallet and practice security hygiene as your wallet will bitcoin wallet will be exposed.

As with many things there is no one size fits all answer.

Doing it yourself means you can set the exchange rate. You can hope to play the numbers and convert to fiat to pay the bills when BTC goes up. You can hold the BTC for as long as you like. And so on. The other side of that is you have to do everything yourself.

The opposite side of that is a payment gateway that gives you a hook / API call from your existing system into theirs and they do everything, take their fee, and put it into your bank account. Much like a CC processor.

And between those two are dozens possibly hundreds of other options.
Some will just run the back end and send you the crypto.
Or you can run the acceptance of the crypto and auto send it to an exchange to turn it into fiat that is sent to your bank.

And so on.....

What anyone does and how and why they do it that way is going to depend on the business and people involved. As I started with, there is no one correct answer.

-Dave