[bactrian]

Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it.

This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards.

As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.

[JohnTHaller]

Bitcoin transactions take hours to confirm now, making Bitcoin useless as a transactional medium. When people are paying 25%, 50%, and more to send Bitcoin of typical levels of purchase, it's time to get out. Stripe is honestly a bit late in dropping Bitcoin for transactions.

[solean]

I sent ~$5k in btc last night for a $3 fee and it confirmed in around 30 minutes..

[JohnTHaller]

Then you got very lucky: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

[gizmo385]

> As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.

You say this as if a large-scale, mainstream switch to a decentralized currency is right around the corner. With how volatile the market has been, what makes you think a switch like this is even remotely near-term?

[philwelch]

It's so obvious, I'm just going to use a decentralized cryptocurrency to hail my self-driving electric car in like five years, so why bother supporting legacy technologies? /s

[vec]

I run a midsize ecommerce site and, from where I'm sitting, Stripe looks at least as essential in a crypto economy as they are now.

We don't want to handle the mechanics of refunds. We don't want to handle the mechanics of disputes. We don't want to get scammed because we screwed up some small detail of our payment layer. We certainly don't want to do our internal accounting in more than one currency, crypto or otherwise. We're a tech company, not a financial services firm.

From our perspective trusting a third party is a feature not a bug. It means less work for us and less surface area that we could conceivably screw up, and I for one am happy to pay a small premium for the extra insulation.

[Jommi]

Wow. The short-sightedness in this comment is astounding. Check out on some of those "advantages" that trusting those thirdparties can mean for you:

https://www.google.fi/search?q=paypal+destroyed+my+business&...

https://www.google.fi/search?q=amazon+destroyed+my+business&...

[vec]

Yeah, sure, what's your point?

I worry about getting screwed over by any of a dozen vendors, including but not limited to our payment processor. I also worry about getting scammed, about losing all our money due to a bug, about costly human errors, and about getting priced out of the market by competitors who take shortcuts I'm not willing to.

On balance, we feel that the benefits of sitting behind a payment processor outweigh the drawbacks. Our trust isn't absolute, but we feel the risk of trusting a third party is smaller than the risk we would have to incur by not trusting a third party.

[Jommi]

Exactly! All I wanted to point out that it's a personal decision, not an absolute one.

[ceejayoz]

You probably should've checked https://www.google.fi/search?q=bitcoin+destroyed+my+business before posting that, considering there's twice as many results as the other two combined. Not to mention things like entire exchanges evaporating...

[Jommi]

Not a single link on the first page relates to actual business getting destroyed.

Also, amount of google searches does not mean much. You should know better.

[ceejayoz]

> Not a single link on the first page relates to actual business getting destroyed.

I see one about Purse.io, but OK.

> Also, amount of google searches does not mean much.

Then what are your Google search links intended to convey? That people occasionally have issues with PayPal/Amazon and blame them for the loss of their business? Sure, there'll always be some of those - and some will be failed businesses looking for someone else to blame. I'm sure there are some legit issues to find in those searches, but it's pretty easy to find stories like Mt. Gox to demonstrate that both sets of platforms have their issues.