Bitpay and RBF

[squatter]

Has anyone ever tried bumping their fee with RBF after paying a Bitpay invoice?

I imagine the transaction would be confirmed with a different hash than the one I paid the invoice with, so it might be a problem. I'm wondering for future reference because I just got caught in a lull with no blocks found for 30 minutes. I'm probably going to be delayed a few more blocks because of it. I just had to cheap out on fees, didn't I?

[pooya87]

i have never tried this so i can not say for sure but technically this should not matter because a merchant is not looking for a specific transaction ID (your TX ID changes if you bump the fee which is practically changing the transaction), they instead are looking for payment to their pubkey in the mempool and in the blocks for confirmation. so if you bump the fee it should still see the new payment transaction and replace it with the old one.

[squatter]

i have never tried this so i can not say for sure but technically this should not matter because a merchant is not looking for a specific transaction ID (your TX ID changes if you bump the fee which is practically changing the transaction), they instead are looking for payment to their pubkey in the mempool and in the blocks for confirmation. so if you bump the fee it should still see the new payment transaction and replace it with the old one.

Thanks. I didn't bother asking Bitpay because anytime I email them, they respond with a bunch of useless boilerplates and never address the question.

I know they are looking for a payment in the mempool to move the invoice to a "processing" state, which stops the 15-min timer. But I had actually assumed the opposite -- that this event linked the invoice to the specific transaction hash. I figured maybe their API isn't set up to recognize a different hash outside the 15-min window. I might try it with a little $10 purchase later just to see what happens.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Thanks. I didn't bother asking Bitpay because anytime I email them, they respond with a bunch of useless boilerplates and never address the question.

I know they are looking for a payment in the mempool to move the invoice to a "processing" state, which stops the 15-min timer. But I had actually assumed the opposite -- that this event linked the invoice to the specific transaction hash. I figured maybe their API isn't set up to recognize a different hash outside the 15-min window. I might try it with a little $10 purchase later just to see what happens.

If you ask,the entire idea of bitpay sounds quite useless to me.I wonder how the fuck they choose to no include the most important feature of any bitcoin related service that is the showing the address where funds are suppose to be sent.
That 15 minutes window is just an add on feature to mark as a transaction being broadcasted and it wouldn't really help if someone has double spent a transaction.

[NLNico]

Yes, this works fine. Better yet, frequently Bitpay allows 0-conf if you don't use RBF (depends on merchant I believe.) So by using RBF and then increasing the fee with "final" check (if its not confirmed in some minutes), it will confirm on their site immediately.

[leowonderful]

Thanks. I didn't bother asking Bitpay because anytime I email them, they respond with a bunch of useless boilerplates and never address the question.

I know they are looking for a payment in the mempool to move the invoice to a "processing" state, which stops the 15-min timer. But I had actually assumed the opposite -- that this event linked the invoice to the specific transaction hash. I figured maybe their API isn't set up to recognize a different hash outside the 15-min window. I might try it with a little $10 purchase later just to see what happens.

If you ask,the entire idea of bitpay sounds quite useless to me.I wonder how the fuck they choose to no include the most important feature of any bitcoin related service that is the showing the address where funds are suppose to be sent.
That 15 minutes window is just an add on feature to mark as a transaction being broadcasted and it wouldn't really help if someone has double spent a transaction.

They've been getting progressively worse over the last two years, which is why all of us should be pushing for merchants to adopt alternatives to Bitpay such as BTCPayServer and Coinpayments. It's not hard to change to a new system, as Coinpayments is actually backwards compatible with most of the features in Bitpay. It'll take some time, but if we all make an attempt to alert merchants of better options than Bitpay, we won't have to pay via a standard made by an obscure BIP anymore.

The trick of appending a website prefix (https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) to get a regular address starting with 1- or 3- doesn't even work anymore. It just leads you to a HTML version of the URL payment page, which is the end of easily extracting a standard address from those Bitpay URLS easily (for mobile users, at least, as there are still applications that extract a regular address on desktops like this: https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface).

EDIT: BIP70 decoder (thanks TryNinja!)

This one should do the trick (and it doesn't require you to download/install anything): https://decoder.bip70.org/

Just paste the whole bitpay payment url (i.g bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/G4qZiiFieMyVb1oUrAebfA) and the tool will give you the amount and address.

[Patatas]

They've been getting progressively worse over the last two years, which is why all of us should be pushing for merchants to adopt alternatives to Bitpay such as BTCPayServer and Coinpayments. It's not hard to change to a new system, as Coinpayments is actually backwards compatible with most of the features in Bitpay. It'll take some time, but if we all make an attempt to alert merchants of better options than Bitpay, we won't have to pay via a standard made by an obscure BIP anymore.

It also depends how much it costs the merchants to shift to those services.For instance if BitPay charges zero-less fees,merchants will obviously go for them since they get an advantage of saving a few bucks instead of going for other services.

The trick of appending a website prefix (https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) to get a regular address starting with 1- or 3- doesn't even work anymore. It just leads you to a HTML version of the URL payment page, which is the end of easily extracting a standard address from those Bitpay URLS easily (for mobile users, at least, as there are still applications that extract a regular address on desktops like this: https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface).

It makes me sick how terrible their functionality is.What does it take to just show a bitcoin address and let people send the money anyway ? I'd call it bullshitting if the say they want to provide 'ease of use' to the customers.

[marky89]

Also, there's rumor that BitPay do this to make Bitcoin looks inferior to altcoin

Definitely. It's as clear as day.

The "network fee" they added is total bullshit. Their customers are already paying a miner fee. And the way they display it now (BTC network fee: $0.xx, BCH network fee: $0.00) is obviously plugging BCH.

They're charging customers the cost to sweep transactions for BTC, but not BCH.

[TryNinja]

The trick of appending a website prefix (https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) to get a regular address starting with 1- or 3- doesn't even work anymore. It just leads you to a HTML version of the URL payment page, which is the end of easily extracting a standard address from those Bitpay URLS easily (for mobile users, at least, as there are still applications that extract a regular address on desktops like this: https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface).

This one should do the trick (and it doesn't require you to download/install anything): https://decoder.bip70.org/

Just paste the whole bitpay payment url (i.g bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/G4qZiiFieMyVb1oUrAebfA) and the tool will give you the amount and address.

[leowonderful]

The trick of appending a website prefix (https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) to get a regular address starting with 1- or 3- doesn't even work anymore. It just leads you to a HTML version of the URL payment page, which is the end of easily extracting a standard address from those Bitpay URLS easily (for mobile users, at least, as there are still applications that extract a regular address on desktops like this: https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface).

This one should do the trick (and it doesn't require you to download/install anything): https://decoder.bip70.org/

Just paste the whole bitpay payment url (i.g bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/G4qZiiFieMyVb1oUrAebfA) and the tool will give you the amount and address.

Wasn't aware this existed, thanks for linking this site! Adding it to my bookmarks in case I need to pay via Bitpay in the future again, though I'll try avoiding that whenever possible.

They've been getting progressively worse over the last two years, which is why all of us should be pushing for merchants to adopt alternatives to Bitpay such as BTCPayServer and Coinpayments. It's not hard to change to a new system, as Coinpayments is actually backwards compatible with most of the features in Bitpay. It'll take some time, but if we all make an attempt to alert merchants of better options than Bitpay, we won't have to pay via a standard made by an obscure BIP anymore.

It also depends how much it costs the merchants to shift to those services.For instance if BitPay charges zero-less fees,merchants will obviously go for them since they get an advantage of saving a few bucks instead of going for other services.

Coinpayments charges lower fees (0.5% vs 1% for Bitpay), and they also support many more coins and even some more features than Bitpay. They're saving money and gaining more features on top of that. If we actively work towards getting merchants to change to alternatives like Coinpayments they will change their ways. Bitpay hurts BTC as a whole in the long run, and the competitors I listed previously are just as good or better than Bitpay. Again, there's just zero reason to use Bitpay, and the only reason why some people are drawn to it is because it's just mentioned so much.

[buwaytress]

Damn me. I paid 10 sats/byte today on a Bitpay (4700+ txs in mempool), it's always been seen as enough to get me to the "waiting for confirmation" page. I thought it was definitely enough anyway but when checked back 50 mins later, mempool had grown to 8k and I wasn't confirmed.

Food delivery, so yelling voices and all that made me RBF with 30 sats/byte. Got confirmed in next block, and invoice marked as paid.

So yes, confirming RBF works with Bitpay.

[1Referee]

Damn me. I paid 10 sats/byte today on a Bitpay (4700+ txs in mempool), it's always been seen as enough to get me to the "waiting for confirmation" page. I thought it was definitely enough anyway but when checked back 50 mins later, mempool had grown to 8k and I wasn't confirmed.

Food delivery, so yelling voices and all that made me RBF with 30 sats/byte. Got confirmed in next block, and invoice marked as paid.

So yes, confirming RBF works with Bitpay.

Interesting. I always get instant settling transactions with Namecheap, even if I slightly underpay in fees. It's either the merchant in question not being very picky (because they can set up their account to make it either very easy or difficult for your transaction to be accepted without fee), or that BitPay just wants to troll Bitcoin users in case merchants operate with default settings.

Positive note for people disliking BitPay for how they messed up, they are falling down like a rock; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitpay.com

The amount of traffic they generate has gone down to such extent, that their alarm bells have to start trigger very soon. Assholes.

[buwaytress]

Damn me. I paid 10 sats/byte today on a Bitpay (4700+ txs in mempool), it's always been seen as enough to get me to the "waiting for confirmation" page. I thought it was definitely enough anyway but when checked back 50 mins later, mempool had grown to 8k and I wasn't confirmed.

Food delivery, so yelling voices and all that made me RBF with 30 sats/byte. Got confirmed in next block, and invoice marked as paid.

So yes, confirming RBF works with Bitpay.

Interesting. I always get instant settling transactions with Namecheap, even if I slightly underpay in fees. It's either the merchant in question not being very picky (because they can set up their account to make it either very easy or difficult for your transaction to be accepted without fee), or that BitPay just wants to troll Bitcoin users in case merchants operate with default settings.

Positive note for people disliking BitPay for how they messed up, they are falling down like a rock; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitpay.com

The amount of traffic they generate has gone down to such extent, that their alarm bells have to start trigger very soon. Assholes.

I use this particular merchant once a week (food delivery) and I remember even at empty mempool, 1sat/byte always got me the "low fee" message, but if I just waited it would confirm anyway. And I'd set 10sat/byte fee (well it's only a couple of cents more) if I thought it might take 2/3 blocks and that would get instant confirmation (Paid invoice I mean).

Now that I know Bitpay accepts RBF, I might play around next time and see if incremental RBFs work.

Hope BitPay sees the light before they get killed, or merchants start to look at better options. Just can't believe they've lasted this long after pissing off so many.

[1Referee]

Hope BitPay sees the light before they get killed, or merchants start to look at better options. Just can't believe they've lasted this long after pissing off so many.

The thing is that it's way easier for merchants to ditch everything related to crypto entirely, because it only results in problems such as people complaining about fees, transactions that have been confirmed but aren't being accepted, refunds that are difficult to issue more often than not, etc. If they ditch BitPay I'm afraid that they will leave for good, and I honestly can't blame them.

Other payment gateways don't have the banking aspect on their side, which makes BitPay practically the best option. If the best option is a bad option why should merchants go for an alternative?

[buwaytress]

Hope BitPay sees the light before they get killed, or merchants start to look at better options. Just can't believe they've lasted this long after pissing off so many.

The thing is that it's way easier for merchants to ditch everything related to crypto entirely, because it only results in problems such as people complaining about fees, transactions that have been confirmed but aren't being accepted, refunds that are difficult to issue more often than not, etc. If they ditch BitPay I'm afraid that they will leave for good, and I honestly can't blame them.

Other payment gateways don't have the banking aspect on their side, which makes BitPay practically the best option. If the best option is a bad option why should merchants go for an alternative?

I suppose you're right, after all. I mean, one only needs to look at all the questions for support on this forum at the Services and Tech Support sections. Wrong deposit addresses. Wrong blockchains. Low fees.

I almost want to say that Lightning Network should solve a lot of these problems, but not for another year or two years until merchants can use them easily.

I've seen some payment solutions that seem to work like POS terminals Pundi X is working on (surprised it actually is in top 20 now). Their settlement system is just another layer on top of blockchains like Bitcoin. Maybe that's the new way forward. So much hassle though for merchants so we're stuck with what we're stuck with.

[BitHodler]

I almost want to say that Lightning Network should solve a lot of these problems, but not for another year or two years until merchants can use them easily.

I'm glad at least that with how people not yet want to spend their coins we have enough time to let lightning network become stronger and more convenient to use for everyone.

Currently there are like 5 merchants that I know of that accept payments through lightning network, but they are really into Bitcoin and know how to set up a node and code a proper script taking care of the payments.

No way a more mainstream merchant will waste time on setting up a lightning node and come up with a script to handle pretty much 0 to 1 or 2 lightning payments? The effort has to yield more.