Topic: How do you feel about businesses that stop accepting Bitcoin? (Read 469 times)

They eventually will accept again , probably looking for some 3rd party merchant to accept crypto . Or maybe they did take it off because barely few people used it on steam . But anyway where is the problem to integrate 3rd party API and let people buy how they want I think it does not take alot of funds to integrate , probably few hundreds and client steam update , thats it

they'll probably be willing to spend some bitcoins after the price has pumped though. bitpay has released some data about this. the more the price rises, the more people are spending to lock in those dollar gains:

I did not have any problems personally with payment processor like BitPay/Coinpayments, they are pretty simple for using if user has at least some basic knowledge how cryptocurrency works. Maybe the biggest problem with these processors is limited time for payment, and if user transaction is not confirmed in the given time, then you need to solve this with support. I recently had a small problem by using CoinPayments (transaction is timed out due to low fee), and i just solve it by sending message to seller to open payment with sending ticket to CoinPayment with ID of transaction.

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As for those who accept bitcoin, and then for some reason stop doing so I can understand if it is a business decision only. But if such decision is in any way politically motivated, then such a service to some extent loses my trust.

I don't care one bit. I like to see more merchant adoption than less, but people just aren't willing enough to spend their coins. Accepting Bitcoin or any other crypto yields more problems than it generates income for you.

Most people who want merchants to accept Bitcoin only want it because they believe the price may pump as result, but never actually spend a satoshi themselves. Just let merchants do whatever they think is right. It's their business.

If Bitcoin was such a great payment method none of the merchants that dropped Bitcoin would have done so. Bitcoin is a horrible payment method. You also have to buy back your coins afterwards. So cool. Not.

Setting a minimum fee requirement, refusing to accept transactions opted in to RBF, and only accepting zero-confirmation transactions for small value transactions (things like a cup of coffee or a fast food order, where waiting around for minutes to hours isn't really an option) goes a large way to minimize these risks. In your example with buying a TV, I completely agree that several confirmations are necessary before considering the deal "done".

My farmers market vendor that I discussed above accepts zero order confirmations from me, but we know each other by name and I'm a regular customer. I don't know what his policies are for new customers. I might ask him next weekend.

there are additional caveats with bitcoin.

at a low enough fee rate, some transactions may never be confirmed, or could take several days after re-broadcasting. so a business may need to incur additional costs using CPFP to reliably receive certain payments within a reasonable time frame (assuming this works reliably at all given miner pool behavior). they may need to require a minimum fee rate or otherwise charge a fee on top that covers their costs to sweep. allowing zero conf tx simply invites people to pay low/no fees, which is problematic for merchants.

the ability to double spend unconfirmed transactions also raises some concerns. with credit cards, your identity is known to the issuer, and there are various factors like IP address/physical delivery address in online purchases and security cameras/witnesses in physical purchases to deter fraud attempts. but with bitcoin, what exactly constitutes provable fraud since outputs are tied to keys, not people? let's say i buy a big screen tv at best buy, pay with bitcoin with a low fee, walk out into the parking lot then double spend the tx with a higher fee. best buy doesn't know who i am, and to boot, is it provable in court that i'm the only holder of those private keys? private keys are hacked all the time, plus they can be controlled by multiple parties.

it seems like confirmed bitcoin transactions are incredibly secure for merchants. unconfirmed transactions? not so much. this is another reason why flexa's model (and presumably bakkt's) are attractive to merchants rather than accepting bitcoin directly. they don't need to wait for confirmations and accounts can be settled quickly because only confirmed outputs (in gemini's custody) are spendable at POS.

Or even for the exorbitant and unreasonable transaction fees in case the businesses have to do refund for a trade gone wrong. Miners fees is driving Bitcoin fans away and this is crazy.

I get what you're saying but here is the catch, with those third party service providers like credit cards, the identify of the customers in regards to name, address of residence etc aren't anonymous but when it comes to bitcoin none of these things are necessary so it's easier for them to go away with fraud using bitcoin which is why the 1 confirmation requirement is necessary.

I actually don't think accepting zero-confirmations transactions is that terrible a thing to do for small volume trades. Let me explain a bit.

Almost every business accepts credit cards. If I pay by credit card, you can see the transaction has been made within a few seconds, but it takes 2-3 days before my card issuer actually transfers the money to the business in question. In those intervening days, it is fairly easy for me to cancel the transaction by phoning my card company/bank and claiming my card was stolen/lost/cloned/phished/hacked/whatever. Indeed, even after the money has been transferred, I can still challenge it and have it reversed if I'm persistent enough. Yet fraud rates are very low and almost every business accepts credit cards.

With bitcoin, the situation isn't that different. You can see the transaction has been made within a few seconds. It usually takes in the order of minutes to hours to confirm, based on your fees, rather than days it takes with credit cards. Once it has confirmed, I can't challenge it, and I certainly can't reverse it months down the line.

I'll say they didn't understand the technology they intended to embrace but just followed the hype of bitcoin and started accepting bitcoin then when things didn't go as they expected they gave up just like new investors who FOMO into buying bitcoin because of the quick money mentality and when things don't go as they planned they give up.

Before a business starts accepting bitcoin as a payment option they should have been aware of all those factor we highlighted here and search for better mechanism to combat them. e.g for the double spending factor, they will only accept payment with at least one confirmation. Simple as that.

I completely agree with your points here, but there are various things that either are happening or could happen to address some of these issues. Lightning network makes confirmation practically instant, and also helps to reduce fees significantly. At the moment for LN adoption is the biggest hurdle to overcome. Most of the time the fees are only high in the first place because too many people just accept the default option their wallet is giving them, and we end up in a rapidly escalating loop of people jumping over each other to guarantee inclusion in the next block. A combination of better education and better wallets that don't do this could really help things.

Well said, and this is what I was thinking as well, though I'm not sure how much confirmation time has to do with a merchant's decision to drop bitcoin.  My guess is that people just aren't using bitcoin to pay for anything.  I mean, come on--the majority of people walking around on this planet don't own any crypto whatsoever and have no problems with using their debit/credit card to pay for things.

I think businesses that take bitcoin are doing it because bitcoin was red-hot in 2013, 2017, and now this year.  They want to jump on the bandwagon and they probably think accepting bitcoin might attract more customers.  Most businesses are not like Veldt Gold, which is primarily a huge supporter of crypto.  As stated, the stores that do take bitcoin don't actually receive bitcoin; they get fiat, so they really don't have any interest in crypto.  Like any other business, they just want your money in whatever form they can get you to send it with.

And as far as OP's question goes, I hold no malice toward any company that dropped bitcoin.  Like I just said, they most likely weren't crypto supporters in the first place and didn't deserve credit as such to begin with.  If people aren't using bitcoin to pay for their stuff, there's no reason to keep it as a payment option.

Bitcoin works as an investment.  It works great, in fact.  As a currency, it sucks ass--and I hate to write that on a forum dedicated to it, but it's the truth as I see it.  Fees, confirmation times, no customer protection, and some other factors I can't think of at the moment are the reason I say this.  I would predict that not only will merchant acceptance of bitcoin not grow, but it will actually decline to the point where there will be only a handful of places where you can spend it.  But we'll see.

I think there are too many complications to implementing these bitcoin payment services. A company doesn't want to invest in developers who can implement a bitcoin payment processor as that adds to their business costs. Instead, they choose to use a third party payment mediator like BitPay/Coinpayments which are buggy as hell. This causes their customers to have unsatisfactory experiences and they rather get over a payment than lose a customer.

I also observed this before on Steam, since I tried to play some games on steam and tried to purchase steam wallet funds by using Bitcoin, I think they also used BitPay before.

Just like what mjglqw said, it's BUSINESS. Since what I observed of gamers nowadays, not only on steam but on the general that don't have any idea what bitcoin is, they are just there to play games.
So, maybe Steam decided to stop accepting Bitcoin because of some problem like the volatility of the price of Bitcoin, the transaction confirmation (especially on the time they started to accept bitcoin, the network is really clogged before and the transaction fees are high).

I agree with you, but the hurdle to that is the initial set up. Accepting bitcoin payments directly involves a lot of time, money, and effort to set up your own wallets and terminals, train your staff how to use them, figure out a way to cash out if you need to, and sort how to pay your bitcoin taxes.

Setting up BitPay involves making an account and downloading an app. Even with the fees, BitPay is still cheaper than using credit cards, which almost all businesses do.

They're better off accepting Lightning payments and skip BitPay entirely.

If you ask like $0.10-$0.50 in processing fees just because of the on-chain fees (which goes on top of the on-chain fees people have to pay for their own transaction), which BitPay does, that's not a good payment alternative at all, and I'm sure that there behind the scenes are a few other things they charge the merchant for aside from the default 1% fee.

I'm frequently using Bitrefill and I absolutely love their Lightning integration. If merchants start adopting this, they are less likely to drop Bitcoin as payment option.

She was cashing out in part, and partly keeping some bitcoin to use as an investment and as a payment to others. From chatting to a couple of her employees, I believe one or two of them may have been accepting part of their salary in bitcoin, although I don't know this for sure. It is much easier for a small local company to do something like this than it would be for, say, a Starbucks employee.

If more primary sector companies down the supply chain started accepting bitcoin, then that would help more secondary and tertiary sector companies accept bitcoin too. But for the primary sector to accept bitcoin, the secondary and tertiary sectors need to want to pay in it. It's a bit of a Catch 22.

Personally, for me, it's not a big deal after all.

Surely they have a sort of reasons why they decided to removed bitcoin payments which are reasonable to their views. Views that we customers will not understand.

These companies are reputable and no way they will just accept or removed a certain payment without undergoing a brainstorming. They didn't accept bitcoin just because of it's promising great value in the future. It's out of their context as their purpose is purely business.

I do not feel any bad about those companies that stopped accepting bitcoin due to whatsoever reason they may have; fiverr.com fall into that category.
The major problem with them is that they do not have a crypto background but adopted it when the going was good.

Cheapair.com has been accepting Bitcoin for flights since 2013 and Air Baltic started accepting BTC in 2014. There are several more places where you pay for flights with BTC:

Overview of all airline & flight ticket sites that accept bitcoin

It sounds like that business owner was still cashing out, just not via BitPay. They might have been relying on the capital gains associated with the ever increasing price in 2017 as a means of additional profit associated with accepting bitcoin.

I have both met and read about some business owners who use the acceptance of bitcoin as a means to purchase bitcoin at what they consider "low" prices. These business owners probably also generated some additional amount of sales from their bitcoin acceptance.

A business owner ultimately needs to pay for their inventory, payroll and other bills out of their revenue. If a business could pay for some of these expenses in bitcoin, I believe more businesses would accept bitcoin, and would probably push their customers to pay in bitcoin.

I am not aware of any business you can buy plane tickets with bitcoin, although you can use gyft to buy gift cards for various airlines.

It sucks, but it's their business. That's their prerogative. If it's a hassle for them or the volume is too low to warrant the trouble, I think it's fair enough to pull the plug on Bitcoin payments.

I feel like the pendulum is swinging back towards increased merchant onboarding though. Flexa just brought on a bunch of big retailers like Starbucks and Whole Foods, and I also saw AT&T is now accepting BTC through Bitpay. This last couple weeks has seen a huge wave of merchant adoption.

My experience is on Fiverr, I used to hire a lot of people here because they use Bitcoin and I don't have or not using PayPal anymore, but after they take down Bitcoin I have to shift to Bitcointalk services section, or ask a friend who has paypal to use his paypal to make a transactions, but still hoping that they will accept Bitcoin again.

You don't need to buy a house.we are talking about stores that accept BTC. You could spend BTC on supermarkets like Walmart for example, every week. That would not be visible.



In Brazil there is no tax if you never convert your BTC to Fiat. Taxes are paid here when you cash out. If you never cash out, zero taxes. .
I thought most places were like this.


Edit: my mistake. Made a small research now. You have to pay taxes for that too . Sorry. But, hard to trace. I would not report

A car or a house is pretty darned visible. You could buy a pile of gold, but most gold places will report you. Once you have your high value item you may want to get rid of it in which case you're more than likely going to have to accept a large amount of money into your bank account. In most places of course tax is taken on trust but you never know how or where you might trigger something.

Bitcoin fans still seem to be painfully naive about this stuff in the main, though some are lucky enough to live in places where it barely registers either in the amount of tax charged or the laws around it.

I suspect he's talking about it being less easy to trace. It has crossed my mind as well, to just buy some high value item instead of cashing out to my bank account.
In the end, I do report everything to the tax man though

I don't have similar stories, but from your stories, I think it depends on the business itself whether they still accepting bitcoin or will stop from accepting bitcoin. We cannot force them to still using bitcoin as the payment, and I think they will research what type of payment system that will good for them. I think it's not a problem for us at least, and we could still withdraw the bitcoin first into a local fiat then we can use the fiat to buy something.

Where I'm at just because you've bought something without converting to fiat does not mean you're magically immune from the tax on the difference between the price you paid for the BTC and the price you spent it at.

For me, I can actually understand that not all of the business models and industries are compatible with the bitcoin. So accepting bitcoin as one of the payment methods would only give them some complications with their sales, accounting, and auditing.

I used to admire Lamborghini as they were accepting bitcoin for payment from their units. If I were given a chance to hodl a large amount of Bitcoin, I would have bought from the Lamborghini. If there will be a cryptocurrency that can prove and provide stability, then there is a big chance that the Bitcoin will be accepted in each and every business model.

That's the point.

Do people really want to pay with BTC, or just want to accumulate BTC?

Thinking about taxes, it would be efficient to buy lots of stuff with BTC, this way you can avoid paying taxes when converting to Fiat.



This is good. And probably those business are receiving free market. It's almost an investment, if your customers are interested in BTC (like a computer or game store)

I have no feelings on the matter. Businesses exist to make money. If accepting BTC doesn't make them money then they should get rid of it.

And no way will I pay more or accept worse or less convenient service just for the honour of paying in crypto. I ain't no charity case and crypto won't progress because of a bunch of saps subsidising it.

Yup, I definitely act the same. Heck, back in 2014 I started purchasing beef jerky from someone who was selling it here on the forum.
They had beef jerky that wasn't at all available where I live, so I didn't mind paying a small premium for it.

I'm all for supporting small businesses, especially when they accept Bitcoin.

Agreed. I have talked before on here about a vendor at my local weekly farmers market who started to accept bitcoin, and has continued to do so through the recent bear market. Prior to this, I visited the farmers market about once a month, and bought from a variety of vendors - their produce is always better than the supermarkets obviously, but it is a little bit out of my way unless I have another reason to head up that neck of the woods, and so I didn't often make the journey. Now though, I'm down there probably 3 weekends a month, and I'm almost exclusively buying from the one vendor who accepts bitcoin. I'm happy to trade a little inconvenience to support him, and I'm always hopeful the other vendors might take note of the extra bitcoin business he gets.

Fair enough, I definitely understand that it might just not be in businesses best interest in keep accepting Bitcoin, but on the other hand, I do find it pretty telling that they'd throw in the towel so soon.
In the case of Steam, I think they only lasted a couple of months.

Granted, the main reason why they stopped accepting Bitcoin, was because of the many support requests due to the increased amount of fees.

Then again, there are businesses that keep accepting Bitcoin despite all the negative aspects, so when they do that, I'll give them some extra support when I can.


Oh yeah completely forgot about Fiverr, good that you mention it.
don't use them a lot anymore, but that's for other reasons.


Ah yeah, Expedia, I've had a pretty bad experience with them. Last year I was planning a trip and wanted to pay part of that trip with Bitcoin, only to find out that Expedia stopped accepting Bitcoin.

Pretty much this. There is a small, local company who I occasionally shop from who started accepting bitcoin directly (i.e. not via BitPay or similar) around 18 months ago during the height of the bull run, and stopped taking it at the end of last year, just after the crash down to ~$3,000. I spoke to the owner about it the next time I was in and tried to pay with bitcoin - she told me it simply wasn't worth the hassle for her anymore. She was having to dedicate time and money to training staff on how it works, curating their wallets, cashing out, sorting out taxes, sometimes dealing with refunds, etc. At peak prices, it was generating enough income to make that worthwhile she told me, but that simply wasn't the case during the bear market.

We can't expect businesses to do something that isn't profitable just because we want them to. If we want them to accept bitcoin permanently, then we simply need more people to want to pay in bitcoin.

Expedia used to accept bitcoin and no longer does.

As much as I like to spend my coins directly to businesses, most businesses that accept bitcoin instantly cash out via their payment processor.

I also understand the decision to continue accepting bitcoin is a business decision at the end of the day and I cannot fault a business who declines to continue accepting bitcoin.

Businesses are simply going to integrate bitcoin payments only if they think that enough people will use it, and benefit them in the end. Take note, these services are businesses; not charities. Most businesses removed BTC payments either because only a very small percentage are using them, or because of the transaction speeds, or both. Which are very understandable reasons for removing BTC payments.

I used to spend some bitcoins with Fiverr until it stopped to use it. Well no big deal, another site get my money, no wrong feeling. Enterprises aren't really interested in BTC itself it's rather to respond to demand and/or to increase their sales. Very few are real BTC enthusiasts.

What you never know, and that's a shame, is why they leave Bitcoin once it's introduced. It cannot be a matter of volatility because, as I said, most of them convert into fiats. Is this a lack of knowledge, no adequate infrastructure or local laws.
Although on the user end everything is done to be easy to use on the business end there is still a lot to do.

Remember when Steam decided to accept Bitcoin, only to roll back their decision later on?
Does stuff like that have any effect on your view of said business?

Or the other way around, do you look at a business more positively when they've kept accepting Bitcoin, also during hard times (bear markets, high fees, etc.)?

For me, it has kinda altered my view of Steam for example, I feel it was kind of a cop out when they decided to stop accepting Bitcoin payments.

Also, my mobile provider in Belgium once accepted Bitcoin (Mobile Vikings), but then they were taken over by another company, who then removed Bitcoin payments.
That caused me to switch providers, not just because of that though, the other company gave way worse service.

Now, Takeaway.com on the other hand has accepted Bitcoin from the beginning and never stopped accepting it afaik.
I tend to order more from there because of this, I have this tradition where I order a bunch of pizza from them on Bitcoin Pizza Day, paying with Bitcoin of course.

How about you, do you have any similar stories?