Doesnt Bitpay have the same service as your project? They also dont like offchain solutions and have made sure that everything stays onchain by adding BCH in their accepted coins because its more scalable.
What would be your technical advantage over Bitpay?
Yeah BitPay is on-chain solution but it's for ordinary payment transactions, not for instant transactions. Online merchants using BitPay need to be sure their incoming transactions are confirmed thats because buyers can double-spend their unconfirmed payments.What would be your technical advantage over Bitpay?
>>https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002990823-How-do-I-prevent-double-spend-fraud-on-unconfirmed-payments-
BitPay is for online merchants not for physical merchants this is done so when you make a bitcoin payment for e-commerce with BitPay it does not matter when your transaction will be mined. Let say you bought something online through BitPay and your transaction is confirmed 3 hours later, once its confirmed then online merchant post your order. In the contrast way in terms of physical commerce it's essential to make instant payments because nobody would wait for 10 minute to buy a cup of coffee from a local store. That's why bitcoin is only used for a store of value and investment tool rather than used for daily payments.
Okay I understand now, ty. But why do you have hesitations in using offchain solutions like Lightning Network? Wouldnt your service be doing transactions offchain like Lightning Network, but a centralized version?
Comparing to Lightning Network, on-chain has 3 main advantages over LN in terms of spend flexibility, macro-payments, integration easiness and offline payments.
a) Spend Flexibility
LN uses payment channels and you need to lock your funds into a multi-sig address. You are not allowed to spend your funs outside LN and (probably) outside your payment channel. Each payment channel has a deadline so you have to wait till a certain time (locktime) to redeem rest of your funds back which is a very significant problem.
b) Macro-payments
LN is built for only micro-payments, not for non-micro payments due to some technical limitations. Underlying reason is you have a connection path on your payment channel and each node have to be funded at least the amount of your payment. Lets say you want to make a payment about 1 BTC through LN each node on your path have to be funded at least 1 BTC which is likely impossible.
c) Integration easiness
LN scales existing blockchains but it's a different structure than blockchain, it's a separate galaxy. Even blockchain adoption is not happened but existing wallets, exchanges, services, ATMs are all using blockchain protocol while LN offers another protocol. Both merchant and customer have to maintain commerce on same protocol, they need to use a LN integrated wallet for commerce.
d) Offline payments
Trade on LN happens only between peers so each peer have to be uptime as much as possible. Peers need to operate 7/24 online nodes otherwise payment channel crashes. On blockchain each node stores same copy of ledger. So peers don't have to be 7/24 online because other nodes are storing their transaction data alongside rest of chain data.
Yeah but wouldnt your service be doing offchain transactions or function like a centralized money processor for BTC users like BitGo or a combination? I read that BitGo also has instant transactions but for a higher fee.
BitGo has instant transaction feature but they are using multi-signature addresses in a centralized way. I think on-chain is the best approach, transactions should be maintained on the main blockchain.
