Topic: It costs more to use bitcoin on bitpay than bitcoin cash (Read 606 times)

Maybe you were thinking of Overstock. That's the only company I've ever seen that disclosed holding onto bitcoin payments: OSTK to HODL: Overstock to Keep 50% of All Bitcoin Payments as Investments

Upon some investigation, it appears you are correct. For some reason I thought that gyft received bitcoin directly, and actually kept a percentage of it

not on gyft you can't. their cards only come on preset amounts. on egifter, you can buy the exact amount. i guess that's a 3rd reason to use egifter instead of gyft:
1. discounts ("egifter points" to apply at checkout)
2. you can use netcents instead of bitpay
3. you can specify exact amounts, down to the cent

one major caveat is that some of their gift cards are for USA only. so be careful to check the description before you buy.


yep it's inconvenient. but at least with uber eats, gift cards are added to your account so you can just apply the unused balance to your next order. maybe just buy a card the day before so there's no headache waiting for confirmations.

Thanks for the tip guys, and I know I should probably vote more with my wallet and do stuff like switch to gyft or whatever... but the hassle of buying a card and then using it up puts me off.

But tell me, have they updated how gift cards work? Can you buy an exact amount now, say like for Uber eats, or do you get to keep unused balances?

Uber eats is okay in my place but more expensive to use for the transport. But I would use it if I could get say netcents and buy a card with an exact amount. The 6-confirmation wait means I have to plan my buy like what... an hour ahead? And god forbid someone changes their minds about their order in that time haha.

but the only way to use bitcoin on gyft is through bitpay.

egifter is a better option for a couple reasons. unlike gyft, they still offer discounts. uber gift cards are 1% off and they also sell uber eats gift cards with a 2.5% discount. and if you really dislike bitpay, egifter also offers a 2nd option---netcents. i tried them once though and it wasn't a great experience. they didn't release the gift card until my payment had 6 confirmations.

Pro-tip - you can use sites like gyft to buy gift cards for Uber, which I would think also can get you uber eats, but I am not sure. You can also buy gift cards to various other restaurants.

Yeah, I am a regular enough user of BitPay, unfortunately, because it's the only way I can use Bitcoin to order food (delivery), which happens at least once a week (sort of a tradition now and the kid gets a kick out of using Bitcoin).

As figment says, they overcharge the normal network fee every time, their dynamic fee adjustment also progressively overestimates. ie. the more congested the network, the greater the variance between what they charge you as a "network fee".


Primarily yeah, secondary a sneaky way to gain even more profit I'm sure. Users still have to pay the correct miner fee for next-block confirmation -- and from my experience this is equal to the network fee (in raw satoshi)... regardless if you're using SegWit or not!

So every time I use BitPay I lose on two fronts:
1. Paying their exorbitant network fee (which I'm sure leaves them with a balance when they consolidate since every input pays this fee).
2. Paying a miner fee that is WAY higher than what I would need for next-block confirmation, and as if I'm not using Segwit.

It used to be, when I'd try pay the regular fee, and allow BitPay to issue the "Unconfirmed Payment" notice -- the order would still go through if the tx confirmed in 30 mins anyway. AND, you could still do RBF with a few minutes to spare and everything would be fine.

But a few months back, they just killed off RBF (if your tx was RBF, they'd auto issue Unconfirmed Payment and then you have to get a refund from merchant).

So now, I just bite down whenever I'm ordering and the network's a bit crowded. It is ridiculous really.

P.S. I think the right title here is that Bitpay charges a higher fee to use Bitcoin than Bitcoin Cash;) It does make me wonder though, is it pricier to buy the same item in BTC? Only way is to see the invoice in BTC and BCH and compare. Is the dollar amount the same? I don't have BCH so I wouldn't be able to see the invoice I think (since you need to launch a wallet).

Indeed. Compared to Bitcoin it might look pathetic, but the fact is that it has a genuine community, some influential supporters in terms of mining and exchanges/services, and is comfortably the #4 coin by market cap. It's not going anywhere.

I think Bcash might actually have enough believers for an OTC market to exist; /r/btc has a quarter of /r/bitcoin subscribers (even if many are regular bitcoiners subscribing out of curiosity, their overall views are probably more or less accurately reflected with upvotes/downvotes), and local.bitcoin.com is moderately popular for a new local-/P2P-based exchange.

I believe most major alts have OTC markets, although not as big as the BTC OTC market. Altcoin OTC trading volume has very likely declined along with altcoin exchange volumes.

I'm absolutely positive an OTC service selling BCH would be a vast success in principle. Where it fatally stalls is that it's going to need an equal number of buyers...

jihan wu was planning to launch an OTC platform for bitcoin cash. it was actually supposed to launch last month but i haven't heard anything about it since june. i can't imagine there's much OTC demand but jihan seems like a true believer. he thinks "if you build it, they will come". we'll see.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ex-bitmain-ceo-jihan-wu-set-to-launch-crypto-otc-platform-next-month-report

I would be pretty amazed if BCH had any type of OTC market. If one ever did exist it was probably Roger/ Bitmain only and weirdly enough they may not be super keen on buying any more.

I'd love to know what proportion of their throughput is BCH. It can't be very high.

Based on the transaction that jackg posted on the previous page, it doesn't look like BitPay is using SegWit years after it has been implemented. This implies their engineering staff is thin and possibly is suffering from a 'brain drain'.

I doubt that's their model. It's far too risky in terms of volatility. They likely have hedging mechanisms so they don't need to worry about the hour-to-hour volatility of Bitcoin. I recall reading that they sell everything OTC now -- likely at a premium -- and don't use exchanges for converting BTC/BCH to USD.

Their Bitpay and Copay wallets are infamous for drastically overestimating fees. I guess we shouldn't expect anything different from their business.

That's what I am doing , i have a reason to ignore the fee gap and stick to bitcoin.


But not with me , I am the one who don't believe in most fork coins, don't have any bitcoin cash and have no plan to have it.

I would always glad to do a direct transactions if there's a lot of option , unfortunately there's not much option, so for now a third party service like bitpay is needed .

I just checked an exchange and they're valued around 0.03 which is really low based on how endorsed they are by other companies. I had money on an exchange, maybe I should've given in and paid with that but I also don't want to hold bch and it seems better to pay without coming from an exchange (not sure why they don't realise that).


While the money is in there addresses, they have it. They could easily try to stockpile coins on another address to make fees cheaper and send those at 1 sat/byte.

This is the business model of quite a few sites in cryptocurrency, I saw some leaving transactions at 1 sat/byte to confirm that were months old.

Fees for credit cards in the UK are at 1% (debit is about 0.25-0.5) - paid by merchant - so this makes it much more expensive to spend bitcoins than it would for the merchant to accept debit, but it's nice to pay with btc so...

As I said earlier and what PrimeNumber7 saidroutinely confirming 1 sat/byte transactions does them no good. They are making money on the % they charge business. You you buy a laptop for $1000 BP takes their 1.5% so the merchant gets $985 the next day.
With that $15 they have to move it twice and make and hopefully make a profit on the sale of the BTC So they assume the worst case fees.

It sucks, but it's their business model. And for now it seems to be working for them.

-Dave

I've still got plenty which I've been happily spending over the years. I fully expect it to go nuts again. But Bitpay embracing is a dead end all the same. No one's going to buy it to save a few cents on fees. The chain is empty which shows that hardly anyone is using it.

Even if they hate Bitcoin there's little reason to reject the tools that'll make them more money other than that hate.

A lot of bitcoiners hold both, I always suggested the smart thing to do was to hold both coins at the fork.  BCH has hung around better than a lot of people expected and I wouldn't be surprised if it pumped to insane levels like it did during the last bull run. 

Middlemen are annoying and add no real value, the whole point of bitcoin was to cut out middlemen in the first place.