I would like to offer Bitcoin as a checkout option.

[miranda_0]

I would like to see a simple way to integrate Bitcoin to the checkout options of my website https://www.kerstmutswinkel.nl.
But should I do it? Because lately I read a lot about payment services ending Bitcoin support because of high transaction fees and long confirmation time for buyers.

I would like to hear your opinions, ideas and help to set up Bitcoin as a checkout option.

[1714908096]

1714908096

[1714908096]

1714908096

[Pmalek]

I have read that many people are recommending BTCPay. Read what it is all about here > https://btcpayserver.org/
Bitpay seems to be the most widely used option but there are many negative stories about it going around here.

[mocacinno]

The difference between btcpay and bitpay is that btcpay is a toolset to become your own payment gateway without the need of any thirth party. This means that if you setup a btcpay server, you won't be paying any service fees.
Bitpay is a thirth party payment provider. They do most of the technical work for you, and provide you with an easy to use api. A lot of shopping scripts already have a bitpay plugin. So implementing bitpay is usually pretty easy and secure, but you'll have to pay their service fee.
Btcpayserver is free, but you'll have to make sure everything is setup correctly, up-to-date, backupped,...

As for OP's other concerns: a long time ago there was a big spam attack on the network. At that time, the transaction fees exploded and it was possible transactions remained unconfirmed for hours/days. I can only guess you were reading articles that were written at the time the spam attack was happening. It has been a VERY long time since such an attack happened. If your customers pay a very small fee, the odds of the transaction remaining unconfirmed for more than ~20 minutes are small. Now, a spam attack might sound scary, but the way the bitcoin protocol is written means that no funds should get lost. A transaction either ends up in a block (sooner or later) or it gets dropped from the mempool of the nodes (some nodes might keep the transaction in their mempool longer than other nodes). No funds "dissapear". Also, don't forget traditional banks have security problems and downtime from time to time...

At the time of writing, if you have a non-segwit wallet and you fund a non-segwit address and a non-segwit change address, and want a very good chance of getting your transaction into the very next block, your customer will need to pay the equivalent of 8 dollarcents (~0.07€). On average, 1 block is found every ~10 minutes, if i'm not mistaking bitpay requires 3 confirmations... So bitpay will probably release your funds in less than 40 minutes after the payment has been made. Offcourse, if your customer cheaps out on fees, and only pays 1 or 2 cents, the odds exist that he'll have to wait a longer time before his transaction is included into a block...
Last but not least, this is the "allmost worst case" scenario. If your customer uses a segwit wallet (wich is more or less the default nowadays), he'll pay a lot less. If he doesn't mind waiting an hour, he can pay a lot less,...

[Carlton Banks]

Bitpay is a thirth party payment provider. They do most of the technical work for you, and provide you with an easy to use api. A lot of shopping scripts already have a bitpay plugin. So implementing bitpay is usually pretty easy and secure, but you'll have to pay their service fee.

The BTCPay api is supposedly the same as Bitpay's, to make it easier for webshops to switch between them, so I'm not sure that's such a plus point for Bitpay.

It's true though that BTCPay needs more setup, but not much more really.

• Bitpay: you need to setup an account with them, register your business etc
• BTCPay: you need to setup an account with any Bitcoin exchange, then you need to tell the BTCPay software to send money to that exchange

But, Bitpay comes with a far more complex risk: the Bitpay company have consistently tried to interfere with Bitcoin's direction. They're literally still doing it today.

As a customer, you're told by Bitpay that you must use their special wallet to pay with Bitpay, that on it's own is totally against the standards based Bitcoin ethos. But with Bitcoin, that carries yet another risk; Bitpay tried to help split the Bitcoin system into 2 parts already a couple years ago, so that them and their corporate buddies at Coinbase + Circle etc could change Bitcoin's nature to something more controllable. Because you're forced to pay Bitpay bills using their wallet, Bitpay can just randomly switch you over to their changed choice of Bitcoin's rules, exactly as they tried to in 2017. They're sneaky like that.

If Bitpay are willing to play such cheeky clever games like that with normal people paying with Bitpay, how much respect do you think they have for their webshop clients?

[The Cryptovator]

I will not recommend to use Bitpay. First thing there fee is quite higher from others and they will make trouble with KYC requirement. If you know some technical work then you might use BTCPay as already explained above by other users including different between BTCPay and Bitpay.

Also you may use Electrum merchant for more safety, but I am not sure if there is fee requirement for receive fund, if so then obviously will be lower than Bitpay. You may read their article, How to accept Bitcoin on a website using Electrum

If you don't have enough technical skill then you may use third party API like coinbase (But is not recommended). As far as I knew they doesn't required deposit fees. You may read more about their commerce API, https://commerce.coinbase.com/docs/

If you in case use coinbase API then you should move your fund on Hot or Cold wallet regularly due to security reason.     

[bitmover]

If you don't have enough technical skill then you may use third party API like coinbase (But is not recommended). As far as I knew they doesn't required deposit fees. You may read more about their commerce API, https://commerce.coinbase.com/docs/

If you in case use coinbase API then you should move your fund on Hot or Cold wallet regularly due to security reason.     

Coinbase is the same as bitpay. Maybe even worse, as you won't even have the privatekeys of your funds and they are strictly regulated, freeze account funds at will and so on

It is not a matter of technical knowledge
 You don't need more technical knowledge to use btcpay. OP came to he right place asking for questions and definitely he shouldn't use neither bitpay or coinbase

[The Cryptovator]

Coinbase is the same as bitpay. Maybe even worse, as you won't even have the privatekeys of your funds and they are strictly regulated, freeze account funds at will and so on

Most likely you missed something from my post, please check bold part below.

If you don't have enough technical skill then you may use third party API like coinbase (But is not recommended).

I didn't recommend him to use, it's just a option. It's not like worst as you said. Do you think no one using their API services? I am not supporting them to use but not like you describe. Coinabse also freeze my account but their good thing that I like, they return fund. Until you withdrawal your fund they will not freeze your fund there. I know privates keys belongs to them and that's why fund should not hold there even use their API.

However, I have visited OP site likely his business on start up mode. So you may choose any easy mathode for now. Its matter of time , you will learn everything coming days.


Anyway, OP should use BTCPay server since most of people suggesting it.

[Lauda]

For the love of Bitcoin, never ever recommend anyone to use Bitpay. They are terrible, incompatible with many wallets and will censor vendors and users on demand.

Coinbase is the same as bitpay. Maybe even worse, as you won't even have the privatekeys of your funds and they are strictly regulated, freeze account funds at will and so on

Same type of service, but Bitpay is by far a bigger sell-out and can't be trusted with anything.

[buwaytress]

Before you make a decision -- and you can guess by now a lot of us here don't recommend Bitpay -- I urge you to experience both tools yourself. Andreas Antonopoulos shop has btcpay, and then compare to a merch using bitpay.

Been promoting the former myself but unfortunately, am forced to use bitpay about weekly as it's the only option I have to pay with Bitcoin for in my area.

It has progressively gotten worse instead of improving, as others point out, almost deliberately forcing people to hate bitcoin. I will share you the user experience of how bad it is.

1. It greatly overestimates the fee needed to get next block confirmation (which is the only way now for yr tx to be accepted by bitpay). Worse, it doesn't even tell you what this expected fee is, you simply have to figure out what it is by looking at mempool and then paying about 20 sats/byte more than what you need to.

Before, if your fee wasn't enough, you could still wait for it to confirm, and then the Bitpay invoice would update to Paid. But oh no, now, even if you paid enough AND your tx actually confirmed, the invoice will never confirm, it will just mark you as unpaid and then the merchant will never get your order. They've basically forced you to overpay a miners fee (and they also take their own network fee on top of that btw!).

2. RBF? Also used to be a way to solve the above problem, but now if you opt for RBF, Bitpay also detects it and marks your invoice as unpaid. No questions asked.

I know these pains well with bitpay. The only way to refund these unpaid invoices is to contact the merchant, so you have to make another order, spend another amount, and then negotiate a refund with merchant. The merchant even now can see my history and they themselves told me it's an annoyance and many others face the same issue. I've told them to switch but bitpay has great marketing unfortunately.

[bitmover]

Before you make a decision -- and you can guess by now a lot of us here don't recommend Bitpay -- I urge you to experience both tools yourself. Andreas Antonopoulos shop has btcpay, and then compare to a merch using bitpay.

I was looking at Antonopoulos shop and he accepts BTCpay and Coinbase (non custodial multi-currency). I didn't know they had a non custodial option.

https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1051214765001822208
I did the integration between Coinbase Commerce (non custodial, multi-currency) and EventBrite myself.

LN with BTCPay is definitely on the roadmap next. I'm working on a prototype already. Hope to launch it with my first event in 2019.

https://aantonop.com/checkout/
  Bitcoin or  Lightning Network payments powered by BTCPay Server Lightning Network payments powered by BTCPay Server
  Ether or  Litecoin with Coinbase Commerce (non-custodial)

[mocacinno]

I didn't know bitpay had gotten so bad lately. I have helped people setting up their webshop using bitpay a long time ago, and at that time those people were happy. Offcourse, i'd never recommended to use them as a wallet, but i always assumed that if you were a webshop owner that only accepted FIAT in the past, and you just wanted to offer a payment option for the bitcoin community without having to go trough a big learning curve, bitpay was an easy solution.

Apparently things changed

That being said, i've been running btcpayserver for quite a while now (with lightning integration, already accepted over 100 payments). I don't like to run docker containers without actually knowing what's going on behind the scenes, and i can tell you that my experience is that if you want to setup btcpayserver manually and actually know what's happening, it's a steep learning curve (especially for a shop owner that isn't interested in bitcoin and just wants to offer an extra payment option).

You'll need to run a dedicated server, or at least a powerfull VPS, you'll need to setup a full node, setup nbxplorer, then setup btcpayserver. The synchronisation of your full node alone takes days, the complete setup process takes even longer (and i'm a unix systemengineer IRL, i have no idear if somebody without any experience would even be able to get everything up and running). Even if you manage to get everything up and running, you still end up with btc, so you'll need to exchange your funds for FIAT (given that you're a "regular" webshop owner, and crypto isn't really interesting to you...).

I know, unning a docker container is easyer than a complete manual install, or you can probably get someone else to host your btcpayserver, or you can automate some steps... Still not the same as using a payment provider that just gives you and api and takes care of everything else for you.

In the past, i've used coinpayments, but they didn't have a good reputation anymore either... Are there any payment providers that are still ok for the community without somebody like to OP having to setup everything up themselfs, have a steep learning curve, and potentially give up on accepting BTC because it was to hard?

In case my textwall was TL;DR;:
I'm not affiliated with bitpay, if they really became as bad as everybody is saying in this thread they shouldn't be an option anymore, but only offering a self-hosted sollution to webshopowners that might have little intrest in the crypto community isn't a good option either... So maybe we should think about which payment providers are preffered by the community in case other webshop owner simply wants a sollution that works, without the learning curve

[buwaytress]

I totally agree with moca above this post -- running btcpayserver is probably not as easy as it seems, and I remember following the travails of one merchant who actually made the switch last year. With the help of community, he set it up and had to go through the growing pains but eventually he never looked back. This was an airfare merchant I wish I could find the posts to reference it...

And a fair point on most merchants who run on fiat, who have no interest in crypto other than to be able to accept it as payment. They're running a business and that needs to be respected.

The alternative for these guys, I would suggest to look at, are Mistertango (which is used on a travel site I frequent, I don't mind it, it's like old Bitpay, and I believe Italian), GoCoin (very old and I actually never experienced myself) and Coinify (also very old, which is the whitelabel behind Quickpay if you ever used in Scandinavia). Try them all, why not? I agree, we should have more options if someone HAS to settle in fiat!

But from what I can see from those who have RECENTLY switched from Bitpay to BTCPay like the Hong Kong Free Press, they get a lot of help and support. Maybe even ask around these stores, a useful list that's recent is: https://bitcoinshirt.co/btcpay-stores/

[ArpFlush]

For the love of Bitcoin, never ever recommend anyone to use Bitpay. They are terrible, incompatible with many wallets and will censor vendors and users on demand.

Coinbase is the same as bitpay. Maybe even worse, as you won't even have the privatekeys of your funds and they are strictly regulated, freeze account funds at will and so on

Same type of service, but Bitpay is by far a bigger sell-out and can't be trusted with anything.

And I've noticed that when checking out via the Bitpay-plugin, Bitpay wants me to create an account. Why should I want to do that!

[Deathwing]

-snip-

And I've noticed that when checking out via the Bitpay-plugin, Bitpay wants me to create an account. Why should I want to do that!

Because that is how they keep track of you, your transactions, your visitors, your customers, your products and other factors. You are also forced to use their wallet until you reach their minimum determined withdrawal. Any "legal" issue and your account is closed while your coins are withheld.

[Carlton Banks]

And I've noticed that when checking out via the Bitpay-plugin, Bitpay wants me to create an account. Why should I want to do that!

pffff, I thought it was already as bad as it could be.


Permission less money, turned into something that needs you to jump through multiple hoops to use. Bitpay had such an opportunity, and they've become addicted to making every possible mistake they can (and out of pure lack of respect and decency for both merchants and their customers, what sort of viable business thinks that's gonna work out long term)

[malevolent]

Same type of service, but Bitpay is by far a bigger sell-out and can't be trusted with anything.

Calling them sell-outs implies they ever had any principles to begin with.

BitPay breaking their own Terms of Service (May 2013)