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.

BitPay rates are rubbish. When I first used it, I had to pay several dollars just for a $15 transaction.

But for services using BP as a method of deposit, you can avoid the hefty fees by using an external wallet (e.g. Electrum) and manually lowering the TX fees. It'd still go thru.

Tell me about it! I really wish Takeaway would just switch to another Bitcoin payment gateway, because the amount of fees they charge is way more than needed indeed.
Plus, have you ever had it happen that you manually add enough fees, by copying the payment to Electrum for example, just for them to put your payment on hold until you get enough confirmations?

Mind you, I get why they're doing this, my point is just that they do not use correct fee calculations.

it does seem like the "network fees" collected primarily subsidize their horribly inefficient fee practices. they are paying 28-35 sat/byte to sweep when the network is routinely confirming 1 sat/byte transactions. not to mention the fact that they could save an additional 40% on fees by using ubiquitously compatible P2SH wrapped segwit addresses. i can understand not implementing bech32 because of compatibility but not using P2SH is singlehandedly driving their customers costs up by 40%+. that's a real FU to all of us.

I don't want to release the exact transaction I made but I bought something from a computer hardware store and this is the 2nd hop: https://m.btc.com/9dbeb5a3e0922080ec44b536deb0fd396c8de549128566b0c53af0ad68cef2de

They ended up with 15btc. That store could bring in those size inputs potentially since it sells a lot of different items from usb hubs to smartphones and laptops so this might be an interesting look if anyone wants to delve further...

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Maybe they're right and it's about double the tx fee so they can cpfp if the transaction doesn't go through in a fast manner and they don't want to slow down the rest of the chain.

They can’t wait an infinite amount of time to spend their coin and there is no guarantee that fees will ever go down. Also being a for profit company, they have the right to earn a profit and they have the right to try to influence others. 

The amount they earn from these fees likely varies depending on if tx fees are increasing or not, and if so by how much. I don’t think it is a given they will always have positive profit from eventually spending the coin they receive.

they don't show it on the invoice, but any bip70-compliant wallet (i use electrum) will show the output address. it will also show up in your wallet's transaction history.

i realized at some point they probably implemented bip70 to force people to send from actual wallets rather than from exchanges. people paying invoices from exchanges = lots of expired invoices and refund headaches.


here's a recent bitpay sweep: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/379295a5d3c0ef84fb8cc839ef42a658868bcd7eeac422841dfa8a12095c563c

at the time, they were charging a "network fee" ~ 0.000045 BTC. with 412 inputs being swept, that's ~0.01854 BTC total collected from customers. they actually paid 0.0172644 BTC to do the sweep.

i'm guessing they make a marginal profit on "network fees" during low congestion times like these, and perhaps more during high congestion times. it's tough to analyze because it's unlikely that everyone paid the same exact fee.

Interesting. I haven't used them in a long old time so I had no idea there was something dynamic in place.

If I remember rightly it's a bitch to find out what actual address you're sending to. Is there anyone who has looked in to what fees they pay to move the coins on from there? I wonder if they lay it on fee wise for their own move or keep a nice wee chunk and skimp which must add up. I can't believe they'll be throwing money away.

they definitely have an algorithm that adjusts to network congestion---their "network fee" has been swinging back and forth between $.50 and $2.50 for the past month. but they're still drastically overcharging, sometimes by as much as 10x the true cost for fast confirmation. they basically charge users a very high estimation of what it costs to immediately sweep your output (no segwit of course). and they never immediately sweep outputs.

i'd be surprised if "network fees" weren't a line item in their revenue now. it started with them legitimately believing BCH would be a real competitor IMO but now it seems like charging these fees is just part of their business model.

Well them being owned by Roger ver, bitmain and kraken means a lot.

Kraken - want the conversion fees
bitmain - mine bcash so want more
Roger - some weird attachment to bcash...

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Point is, fees should be included. If I paid by visa on the same site it should've cost the same as bcash.

That could wind up being a lot of fiat. As in 10s of millions of different countries money across the globe. It's easy to say they can combine when fees are low, but if BTC has an up or down swing that causes fees to be high for a week or so it can start to become an issue. Most of their clients get fiat the next day. If fees are high and BTC is down 5% they now either have to float it and hope it goes back up or eat it and take the loss.

A couple of weeks ago I got a new laptop from newegg BTC at that point was $11825 give or take a buck. Within hours of my purchase BTC was at $11,400 and fees were stupid high and would stay high for a few days after too. Guess what newegg got their money in their account and didn't give a shit.

So, their business model requires them to have to be able to move in the next block and you get to pay for that.

We, can argue if it's a good business model or not, we can argue if it's a sustainable business model or not. But it is the one they choose to have.

So their additional fee if you look at it, tends to be the 2x highest fee needed to be in the next block over the last few days. Note, not the average highest fee, the highest fee.

Around here, some gas stations charge more to take credit cards because they have to pay the 3%+ fee to take them, so they pass that to the consumer. You can accept it and pay with your card or pay a bit less with cash or drive to the next station. Same with merchants using BitPay.

-Dave
Edit added 2x above about 15 minutes after initial post. Brain freeze on my part as they tend to move your BTC after 1 or 2 confirms and then move it again later. Not sure why.

They could be combining unspent outputs/spending when transaction fees are low, they're also probably big enough that they could get fiat first from someone else and then settle the bitcoins with them later.

No competently run business would follow the orders of a solitary investor. If he owned it that would be a different matter, but he doesn't.

Clearly they're aligned enough with his thinking. Bitmain also put money in. I presume they've been offered a financial incentive of some sort.

Kraken are full Segwit. They also have many more serious investors. If he told them to drop it they would tell him where to stick it.

From what I see Roger Ver is one of early investors in BitPay, so probably he can dictate such behavior.


I didn't know he is infiltrated there too... 

Volatility doesn't seem like a legitimate excuse for why they charge more for bitcoin than cash. I get that cash transactions are really cheap and these companies probably were convinced by bitpay to accept bcash so that could be why but its going to cause huge problems if a less secure and cheaper version of bitcoin gets advertised to everyone. Most of the major pools would be able to launch a 51% attack on bcash on their own and completely murder the coin...

I do not have bCash shit. So even if I wanted to pay using bCash, I can not. To save ~0.50 or $1, I am not going through all these hassle to buy bCash shit and then pay through bitPay. I will directly pay using my BTC and this is what I do in fact. I am a namecheap customer so I use BitPay very often however I do not like this BitPay shit.

I hope a new business comes up and replace their service which will be Bitcoin focused.

To be fair to them, not that they really deserve it, there have been high spikes in fees for a few hours here and there relatively recently. In an ideal world they'd have some sort of monitoring and live adjustments of what they charge but that could be hard to put together.

They're in the business of getting payments confirmed.

Bcash will always cost fuck all to use. BTC on occasion will definitely not.

Several times make a purchase through bitpay on namecheap these days and yuppp they are indeed looks like force users to swap to bitcoin cash with its higher fee on bitcoin. I'm not happy with that , not a big fan of bitcoin cash though.

Bitpay getting fucked with their recent  policy change .. especially about how KYC needed for certain amount on transactions.

the fee is indeed a reason since it goes up from time to time (as high as 50 these days) even if the current fee of that time were 1 satoshi/byte. so we can't just rule that out.

but also the other reason is the same continuation of the propaganda against bitcoin and pushing BCH on people to force-create use cases for it since over the past year it still remains useless.

I wish I could order a pizza for $7, lol.

To be fair to BitPay, the fee might be higher when they need to spend the coin they receive in what could be weeks in the future.

I don't think most BitPay transactions are for such small amounts. The median transaction value on the bitcoin blockchain has moved between around $160 and $750 over the past three months, and I would assume BitPay transactions would not be far off from this.

You may be correct in saying that BitPay is trying to get customers to use bcash, however additional price volatility in bcash should more than wipe out the expected savings from using bcash.

That's a BS excuse they like to pull to encourage people to switch to bcash. They wanted me to pay an extra ~$0.70 when the 6 blocks fee was 1 sat/B. Since I just wanted to buy a pizza that would amount to an effective fee of almost 10%.

I believe this is to cover the cost to spend the coin that bitpay receives from the payment of the invoice. BitPay will need to either send their merchant coin, or will need to send coin to an exchange to convert to fiat that gets sent to the merchant. It currently costs more to spend a bitcoin input verses spending a bitcoin cash input.

Bitcoin's price tends to be more stable than bcash's price, so the savings from using bcash verses bitcoin is expected to be more than lost due to price volatility.

Yes. To "cover transaction fees".

Doesn't it say "Network cost: X"? Or you're talking about another extra?

I wanted to by something and noticed the site accepted bitcoin, so I went through the checkout and got charged extra to pay in bitcoin rather than bitcoin cash, does anyone know why this is?

It seems bitpay get a lot of bad coverage now and there seems to be good reason why (I wouldn't have made a thread but the price was 50p different which was more than 1% of my total purchase)... As a community there may be issues if bitcoin cash dies or if it keeps going since some of these companies are clearly hugely invested in them.