Bitcoin Forum

A couple days ago a read an announcement that merchants can now start using BitPay service FOR FREE.

Because we all know that "There is not such thing as a free lunch ..." I started asking myself a question how they finance their business.

Only possibility which I found is that they are selling bitcoins to funds & other big players which have interest to get a lot of bitcoins with price low as much as it possible. So they are willing to pay let say additional x% markup instead buyng on exchanges.

What are your thoughts?

agreed, same thought

VC / funds / etf / whales are involved

So this means selling bitcoins for buying things means transferring bitcoins to institutional players. Only idea which I can get in such case is:

HODL & STOP spending bitcoins. Bitcoins are starting to be store of value instead transactional mechanism.

Bitpay AMA

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2c5f1l/bitpay_here_excited_to_announce_zero_processing/cjc2y8p

i user my social service with payment choice bitpay . and work smooth . some disturb me just abou limited received bitcoin .

less and less volume bitcoins be traded at exchangers everyday can prove this, however, they are not going to hold all those coins forever, they also dump huge amount of bitcoin back to us to crash the market for some specific reasons

I have yet to use bitpay, but do they advertise things while you use it? They could be making money from Google ads or something.

At the current stage, what is important is dominance over the market.
Like I have said before, bitcoin isn't very important, and it's just a start of a new scene of open sourced monetary systems. Services like bitpay, are the best way to make money with cryptos. Bitpay isn't dependent of bitcoin and it's success. If a better crypto will emerge and bitcoin will shrivel and die, then bitpay can just change cryptos and continue business as usual. And this is important, because the fall of bitcoin is highly probable, but the fall of the entire crypto scene is highly improbable.

Bitpay is just planning long-term, with securing it's place as the dominant market leader in a newly forming field of payment services. Offering free service is a smart move to accomplish this goal.

FALSE.

BitPay does not need to ask ANY fees from the merchant because BitPay sells the coins. BitPay dictates the number of bitcoins to be sent by the customer and BitPay can always ask a little extra to "cover the risk of 10 minute volatility".

Since merchants choose to receive dollar/euro instead of bitcoin BitPay / Coinbase act as a market maker. They trade with the coins they receive. It's the same business modell as any institutional stock exchange trader has.

For real, bitpay and coinbase could easily charge -3 percent or something like this ...

I guess they may be a great way for 'big money' to buy bitcoins in bulk, as well. Every exchange has some fees, why not just tap the stream of BitPay bitcoins, as well?

Yup you are right.  It is a combination of aggressive plans to maximize market share, build barriers to entry and make money from a freemium business model.  It will be interesting to observe whether this a has a positive or negative effect on Bitcoin's adoption

I think bitpay was only offering free services to non-profits accepting donations, not to all merchants.

I am also all but certain that bitpay earns some kind of spread between the amount of fiat they credit merchants and the price they sell their customer's bitcoin on exchanges.

I tend to agree, although as others have stated, there are other ways for Bitpay to monetize its "free" service.

Its interesting, Merv, that you realize the flexibility Bitpay has, but never acknowledge the flexibility that persons like myself and other adopters on this forum have to switch to new currencies. Those of us on the pulse will always be first movers. Still, why you waste your time on the "Speculation" forum eludes me.

Did you even check their pricing page before posting? Any plan for enterprise level, that involves dedicated point of contact and integration engineering, costs money. So their idea is give away for free to enthusiast shops and make money from them once (some) of those grow into actual businesses.

And yeah, the move was mostly caused by desperation I think seeing how coinbase has been grabbing all the important customers.

Offering payment services to cryptos like bitpay, and speculating on crypto unit value like the users here, have very little in common. Unit value has very little meaning to those who offer services like bitpay. Only thing that matters to them is volume. Those who speculate on unit value are more vulnerable to all kinds of change, and are extremely dependent on unit price.
I think that there are some speculators here, who are talented enough to predict the rising unit value of new cryptos. Just I don't think there are many of them. I base my opinion on experience, where I've seen the majority of users attack everyone, who dares to question the future success of bitcoin, or question if some altcoin has better technical qualities. I think that those people are too emotional about bitcoin to see the rational outcome of things.

They are trying to capture the market first.

So basically you just enjoy speculating on speculators. Smh.