[2018-01-23] Stripe: Ending Bitcoin Support

[vit05]

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

Ending Bitcoin Support
Tom Karlo on January 23, 2018

At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

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.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

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. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.

So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future.

[1714898492]

1714898492

[1714898492]

1714898492

[1714898492]

1714898492

[1714898492]

1714898492

[1714898492]

1714898492

[squatter]

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.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

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.

Bad timing, given that Lightning will probably be in production use this year.

But I'm not surprised, either. The narrative that people are avoiding using Bitcoin because of the associated fees isn't untrue. I use Bitcoin all the time -- but markedly less over the last several months. When I could reliably get confirmations at 1-5 satoshis/byte (and this was a few months ago), I sent payments freely. Now I mostly just consolidate outputs at the lowest fee rates I can. And I see the current drop in fees mostly as an opportunity to further consolidate outputs -- not to spend them.

I'm hoping that companies like Stripe who are dropping out of the sector now will be like the Circles of 2016. My guess is that these are the companies who couldn't sustain through the growing pains, and will therefore miss out on market share during the next boom cycle.

[richardsNY]

Not sad to see you leave, but I'll welcome you back when lightning network gets activated. Putting aside my personal opinion, it in reality is never a good thing seeing whatever service or company take distance from Bitcoin. The more economical adoption Bitcoin enjoys, the higher its usability will become. For that reason I seriously hope that they will at least consider coming back when lightning network is safely active on the main net. Good thing however is that in a market as competitive as the one from crypto, it basically means one goes out, and a few new ones come in to fight for that available market share.

[vit05]

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.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

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.

Bad timing, given that Lightning will probably be in production use this year.

But I'm not surprised, either. The narrative that people are avoiding using Bitcoin because of the associated fees isn't untrue. I use Bitcoin all the time -- but markedly less over the last several months. When I could reliably get confirmations at 1-5 satoshis/byte (and this was a few months ago), I sent payments freely. Now I mostly just consolidate outputs at the lowest fee rates I can. And I see the current drop in fees mostly as an opportunity to further consolidate outputs -- not to spend them.

I'm hoping that companies like Stripe who are dropping out of the sector now will be like the Circles of 2016. My guess is that these are the companies who couldn't sustain through the growing pains, and will therefore miss out on market share during the next boom cycle.

"probably"

  They are aware of this. He wrote about. If Lightning becomes something used and request buy their clients, they will go back to their decision. I think they will just take a time out to understand the whole market and them go back when everything was working properly.

[bbc.reporter]

Stripe are playing around with us by mentioning all those other coins and cryptocoin platforms. It is clear that they will be using Stellar as their premier cryptopayment platform. They funded it, they advised it and they are part of its Foundation's board.

I also reckon Jed Mc Caleb is close friends with one of Stripe's founders.

[Beclecam]

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

Ending Bitcoin Support
Tom Karlo on January 23, 2018

At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

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.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

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. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.

So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future.

The lending project will disappear in 2018. for projects with strong social development

[blockchainlion.com]

That was a very diplomatic announcement. I agree with Stripe, it probably did not make sense for them business-wise to keep BTC integration because of the latest increases in fees and unconfirmed transactions.

I love to see how they express optimism about cryptocurrencies and how they are probably researching the next token to integrate.

Let's see what happens!

[Stegobit]

LN developers, where are you?!!

[chiggz]

Kind of sad to see it go. A company like Stripe is making the effort to normalize block-chain technology for mass adoption by creating familiarity. I read that Stripe was really easy to integrate into any website to process payments.

I think the problem is that most people wanted Core to support a increase in block size, not to run software without any developers behind it. I'm not even sure we needed such a large increase, probably a 50% bump from where we are now would have been sufficient to buy us time to get Segwit fully adopted and LN up and running. High fees actually make it harder to adopt Segwit since it'd be very costly to move all existing inputs to new Segwit addresses, so by having lower fees more people are likely to be able to very cheaply adopt Segwit.

[maxxdxx]

They are most likely planning to use a coin they have more control and stake in like Stellar Lumens which members of Stripe are involved with. Stripe is not really used for payments by the the vast majority of consumers yet anyways so no big loss. They will all come back when the LN will be fully ready for prime time.

[Carlton Banks]

I think the problem is that most people wanted Core to support a increase in block size, not to run software without any developers behind it.

It's not obvious what you mean by "not to run software without developers behind it", the developers were firmly behind the increases to the block limit introduced.

And Core did increase the block limit. It's quadrupled. Since nearly 5 months back. That's what Segwit is. That's why Bitcoin had several 2 MB blocks recently, which were impossible before the soft fork. This was a result of overwhelming user support (which those users long campaigned for).

So you're 300% wrong, blocks are now increased in size, and the developers and users supported it. Please check your facts before posting entirely false information.

I'm not even sure we needed such a large increase, probably a 50% bump from where we are now would have been sufficient to buy us time to get Segwit fully adopted and LN up and running. High fees actually make it harder to adopt Segwit since it'd be very costly to move all existing inputs to new Segwit addresses, so by having lower fees more people are likely to be able to very cheaply adopt Segwit.

Just wait for the fees to drop (they are dropping, you're must be using bad wallet software, or poorly designed fee prediction website). Or sell your Bitcoin if you think it's heading in the wrong direction, no-one's forcing you to buy or hold BTC, there are plenty of alternatives using a different approach. I don't recommend it, but if you're unwilling to use any of the options available as a Bitcoin user, it's difficult to know what else to suggest to help you.

[steadyrice]

It is no surprise that some companies are backing out of accepting bitcoin payments because the transactions are not reliable at the moment. But this shouldn't be a problem for now because hopefully with the introduction of lightning network all these companies will be coming back.

[bbc.reporter]

Kind of sad to see it go. A company like Stripe is making the effort to normalize block-chain technology for mass adoption by creating familiarity. I read that Stripe was really easy to integrate into any website to process payments.

I think the problem is that most people wanted Core to support a increase in block size, not to run software without any developers behind it. I'm not even sure we needed such a large increase, probably a 50% bump from where we are now would have been sufficient to buy us time to get Segwit fully adopted and LN up and running. High fees actually make it harder to adopt Segwit since it'd be very costly to move all existing inputs to new Segwit addresses, so by having lower fees more people are likely to be able to very cheaply adopt Segwit.

I reckon Stripe does not really need decentralization. All it needs is a centralized system that will make their transaction processing more efficient, and maybe they simply believe Stellar is the perfect platform for it. Bitcoin's block size is a not the issue. Also, if you are unaware, Stripe funded the Stellar Foundation from the beginning.