It's time to avoid Bitpay until it protects customers/payers.

[bigb159]

Those of us who have been in the mining game for the past several years and invested in mining hardware know that one of the substantial risks in pre-ordering with Bitcoin is that we believe and have been shown that the value of Bitcoin continues to go up, whether it's in our hands or in the ASIC hardware manufacturer. By the current regimen, we the spenders bear the full risk of the price fluctuation.

For example I recently ordered hardware with KNCminer in August through Bitpay for 38 BTC (3800 USD) on a guaranteed delivery date of October 15th. That date is long past (in Bitcoin difficulty terms) with no delivery date apparent in the near future, so I am left with two choices:

      1. Mine the hell out of the dud that I will be receiving from KNC in November to recoup my losses as best as possible.
      2. Request to cancel and receive a refund of $3800 USD or 19 BTC by current value (and no, we don't expect the price to drop).

Neither of these are adequate choices to have be making. Neither of these will get my money back.

I contacted Bitpay to inquire what my options and protections were as a spender. The reply:

       "We allow merchants to choose whether to provide refunds in native currency or in BTC. This is handled by these merchants on a case by case basis; unfortunately, we don't have any bearing on this decision. Is there anything else I can help you with at the moment, though?"

   I feel as though I should go on record and say that paying through Bitpay henceforth will most likely not be an option for me. I have come to realize that for whatever your reasons be, Bitpay is politically more oriented more towards protecting merchants than customers. I calculate that I have lost 19BTC ($3800USD) by using Bitpay processing to pay for KNC goods, when I cancelled due to their non-delivery on their guaranteed timeline.

       The fact that they allow the merchant choose in which currency to refund the customer means that the customer will always carry the full risk of the transaction alone and alone will suffer any losses due to price fluctuation.

       What I am requesting is that we the people with the money be allowed to force the merchant to refund in the original currency if the merchant failed to deliver the product as advertised.
       I am also requesting that people avoid Bitpay until this protection be afforded us.

[sangaman]

On one hand I agree with you, I think the fairest refund policy would always return funds in the same currency they were received in. That way there's no exchange rate risk.

On the other hand, this seems to be mostly the fault of the merchant and not BitPay. If you take BitPay out of the equation, and lets say you just paid the merchant bitcoins directly, you would be out of luck just the same. I can understand if BitPay doesn't want to act as an escrow or an arbiter between buyer/seller disputes. Besides, assuming that BitPay released the funds to the merchant already, they can't get them back without cooperation from the merchant.

I think it's probably important for people to realize that BitPay won't protect them from unscrupulous merchants with unfair refund policies, but the real culprit here is the merchant. The merchant is the one that chose to refund you in USD when you paid in BTC, and the biggest black mark should be on them.