Bitcoin Forum

On the 22nd December 2017, I bought a product on a shop which accepts Bitcoin payments via Bitpay. The value of the purchase was 0.2 BTC or around $2800. I sent the transaction with 540 Sats/Byte since the Bitcoin mempool was already full. A few minutes later the Bitpay invoice showed that payment was recognized but that it was not confirmed yet.

It needed eight more hours before the transaction got confirmed. However the invoice still showed it was not confirmed. As it did after 10+ confirmations. I was a little bit confused. Two days later the payment still was recoignized but still not confirmed according to the invoice (blockchain showed 50+ confirmations). Then the invoice was suddently archived. It says I should contact the merchant for more information. So did I. However the merchant said he has never received a payment from Bitpay.

On 25th December 2017, I submitted a ticket to Bitpay to clarify the issue. I provided all required information.  I received a confirmation email that they are very busy and that an answer can take up to 3 business days. So I waited without getting an answer. On 1st January I submitted a second support ticket. Between the submission of both tickets I contacted Bitpay Support on Twitter two times without a response.

When I look at the blockchain, I see that my Bitcoins have now been moved through multiple addresses. Since these addresses have high balances, I suspect that they somehow belong to Bitpay.

After almost two weeks I still do not know what happened to my Bitcoins. Does anyone have similar problems with Bitpay?

I heard someone having issue from bitpay but in different problems..
And i think there are lots of in queue customers that is why you are still not receiving any responds yet since all staff is in vacation when holiday season better to wait for their responce..
Also check their blog for news about their site https://blog.bitpay.com/

Thanks, I am following the blog but no news regarding a big queue of customers. In the past, I had different problems with other services but they always let me know that they are working on the problem. But absolutely no reaction since two weeks is inacceptable.

I hope your problem gets fixed really soon and you are worrying me a bit to be honest about bitpay as I exchange my bitcoins through neteller or skrill both part of Paysafe group and here in Italy no problems whatsoever so far. I have not exchanged any bitcoin since the last days of November, so haven't tried on during holiday season. I wanted to exchange about 589 USD a max daily limit to upload and exchange through bitcoin via Skrill, yet I am waiting your good news before proceeding.

Ever since a few weeks ago, I've had similar issues with delayed payments and it's very frustrating, but I certainly haven't waited two weeks for resolution. That instantly drives up my concern level.

BitPay no longer instantly recognize confirmed payments, even though we can see them instantly sweeping them on the blockchain. Last time I made a purchase, I waited 21 confirmations (~4 hours) before they reconciled my payment. It doesn't matter what fee rate you use. Even if you are confirmed in the next block, they never instantly confirm payment anymore.

The most frustrating part of this? They are charging a "network fee" of 0.0005-0.0007 BTC so they can instantly sweep our funds. All the while, they make us wait hours (or days) before they settle payments! It's also insulting because they perpetually blame Bitcoin network congestion for what is clearly abysmal performance of their service. We can all see the blockchain, BitPay. Even their own block explorer (Insight) acknowledges they are fucking us.

I am in the same boat.  I also have a very large sum that didn’t confirm in time on Dec 8th (but did eventually confirm, just not in time for the invoice to be “paid”). Sent my first support request on Dec 13, followed up on the 19th, never heard anything except for an automatic reply confirmation once on the first email. Now, it has been 23 days since the transaction failed and they still have my sizable amount of bitcoin (more than $5k worth). I have yet to hear from them. I sent them a more angry message on the 30th to their email but overall I’ve been pretty patient and quiet for them having so much of my money for so long with no reply. Saying “it will be 1-3 days and don’t send us another email or we’ll reset your place in line” doesn’t cut it when weeks have been dragging by. I have also started pinging their social media pr representatives to deafening silence. 

 I’m getting close to involving legal representation.

Based on the experience I have and people around me, I never heard anyone complain of their service though different people have different experience.

I've only used BitPay a few times but when I have used them, they've worked fine.

In the last month or so though, the minimum transaction value of $100 (which could possibly be implemented again if the fees remain bad (https://blog.bitpay.com/minimum-invoice-update/), but was only around for a couple of days) and the newer complaints have got me worried.

I don't expect companies to move away from BitPay very quickly if they run into trouble or they find processing transactions to be difficult considering the network conditions (or even if they're potentially malicious), since Bitcoin usually isn't a massive part of the companies' business.

Is there a decent alternative for Bitpay?

There is this Bitpay open source fork that I found at reddit: https://btcpay-server-testnet.azurewebsites.net/

"BTCPay Server is a free and open source server for merchants wanting to accept Bitcoin for their business. The API is compatible with Bitpay service to allow seamless migration."

I stopped using Bitpay. I still do not have a reponse. After almost three weeks.

I recently used Cointed (https://www.cointed.com/en/), a registered company in Austria, which uses a payment solution in cooperation with Swiss Crypto Group (https://www.swisscryptogroup.com/). Very smooth processing, zero confirmation payment.

It's interesting that its you and me with transactions in the several thousands of dollars that are being stonewalled, while the many with (relatively) small transactions seem to be getting decent customer service. The paranoid in me would think they are selectively scamming large transactions. But, the objective rational in me would say they are very backlogged due to the massive issues with the network last month so they would have to take extra time verifying everything before they refund really large transactions to make sure they aren't getting scammed themselves.  But it seems really odd that they don't reply at all after weeks.

Are you still waiting for an answer after more than four weeks? And are you still banned from contacting support?

Really weird.

I only used BitPay as a merchat. And never had problems like this.
And they always replied to my support tickets in a few days. I don't understand why they're taking weeks for u..

Hope it'll get fixed soon.

Of course, there is - it is called Bitbay, it offers the same features that Bitpay has. It takes care of handling and processing bitcoin transaction for business clients.
I know that G2A uses it - so far it seems that their system is far superior than Bitpay's, and Bitbay support is faster too.
Unfortunately, you cannot pick your bitcoin processing company - it is entirely up to service, shops, merchant you are using.

Do you have a link? You mean Bitbay, the product for decentralized markets? My understanding was that they didn't even release wallet software yet...


I'm excited about BTCPay Server, but this isn't an alternative for consumers. That would require merchants to drop Bitpay en masse and adopt BTCPay. It is supposed to work as a drop-in replacement so that there is no work for the merchant. But the fact remains that adoption of FOSS takes time.


Interesting. I'm glad to see other services gaining prominence. Bitpay and Coinbase have had a monopoly on this sector for too long. Somebody should probably tell Cointed that zero-confirmation payment comes with significant risks, though.

I got ahead and exchanged my bitcoins to Skrill through Bitpay interface. Although I made a custom fee in Electrum of only 200 satoshi/byte all went well and after 5 hours everything confirmed in Skrill. This latest version of Electrum and also Bitpay made custom invoice for me so no problems at all. I guess Bitpay is trying to make a better service to customers and I am happy about that. I don't think Bitpay have serious problems, at least for now.

To give an update:

After 29 days I finally received a response from Bitpay yesterday. It says


They asked me to provide a refunding address. So I did. Today I received the payment excluded by 0.001 BTC fee. My problem is resolved now.

There are other payment processors like Coinpayments:

https://www.coinpayments.net/

which accept alts.

Bitpay's problem is that it is bitcoin only and they never imagined that the mempool backlogs could get so big and thus didn't have processes in place to deal with that.

Hopefully Bitpay will see the light and enable alts.

Coinpayments is for hosted wallet solutions and general payment gateway for cryptocurrency ("buy now" buttons, shopping carts, and things like that). They aren't an actual payment processor like Bitpay. They can't convert coins to fiat, so it's not a merchant alternative for Bitpay. But as a consumer, I'd like to see them succeed.


Actually, Bitpay has bigger problems. Regardless of transaction backlogs, they are often not marking invoices with confirmed transactions as paid, leading to problems like the OP's.

Regarding alts, Bitpay announced a month or two ago that they are working to add multiple. The first is Bcash. I'm guessing they will also be adding ETH and maybe others too.

Actually, that would make Coinpayment a proper crypto gateway if that's really the case. The problem with Bitpay and payment processors like them is they're not at all helping Bitcoin gain adoption. If anything, they're preventing it, since they're giving a way for merchants to NOT accept Bitcoin, and yet still access the Bitcoin user market. As you can see now, they're running into a lot of problems, which the Bitcoin user is always going to have to pay for.

Merchants, if they're serious about accepting Bitcoin (or crypto) should actually consider moving up to something like Coinpayments. Only then can they truly say they "accept Bitcoin".

BTW, there are a few issues I've seen now regarding Bitpay no longer accepting transactions despite being confirmed on blockchain. This user's issue (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2791597.msg28550578#msg28550578) seems to suggest they're not even accepting direct wallet payments now, instead, requiring you to go through some kind of payment portal?

Bitcoin's supposed to allow people to pay directly to each other, this is just ridiculous, if true.

Edit: after checking they actually do fiat settlement to US and Euro merchants.

No argument there. It's just not the market that Bitpay caters to. I'm glad that people are realizing that merchant adoption via Bitpay/Coinbase is just an avenue for people to sell BTC. It doesn't do much for adoption besides the occasional advertisement for Bitcoin ("Bitcoin accepted here")...... but it is certainly negative for the price since Bitpay merchants have no interest in becoming part of the BTC economy. They just want dollars. That's why I don't really care about merchant adoption and never did. Merchants will flock to Bitcoin (and not through payment processors) in time.


They began mandating compatibility with BIP70 (Payment Protocol), but I'm not sure why that would lead to the OP's issue there. I did notice the change, and inherently it feels less private since so many details are transmitted (no user input). But reading through the details, it's not clear why it should degrade privacy. I don't think it's really feasible for Bitpay to blacklist VPN addresses. It's probably a good idea to hide as much information from Bitpay as possible, though. They are a jackpot for government/law enforcement.


If true, they should update their FAQ. To convert coins to fiat currency, they tell people to buy gift cards and merchandise with coins...

So after 29 days of waiting they responded by returning your money, but what about the goods that you tried to buy with your payment, did they waited for you with reserved goods or what?
Because if there is some kind of sale going on and i decide to buy something that cannot end well for me after almost one month of waiting without clue what is happening with my payment.

No, the order was cancelled two days after I ordered because the merchant have not received any money from Bitpay. I reordered after I received the Bitcoins from Bitpay, but of course, since the Bitcoin price is much less in value today I had to pay almost twice as much as before Christmas. Well, shit happens :)