It is important to recognize that Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. They have a history of diving more deeply into this market [1] and withdrawing from it before [2], so this is just Take 2. This time around, they are not <i>themselves</i> buying Cube Thingies or similar and don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins.<p>I think there will be decent transfer of money from venture-funded NFT startups to Stripe for the next few years, followed by a dip in the market when the startups discover that selling digital art is less of a viable market than they realize.<p>I am personally skeptical about the end market, but Stripe seem well-insulated from the risks. I'm curious what people who are bullish on this think though – what might I be missing about the digital art market? I think paying 12 million pounds for a Renoir is bananas too, but people certainly do it [3]. I just expect digital stuff to be more volatile because it's hard to communicate that combination of artisanship and rarity.<p>On the topic of well-made shovels, I highly recommend the Voile Telepro in HN Orange [4] as a portable snow shovel to keep in your car if you live in a snowy climate. They will probably be on sale in spring and summer.<p>----------------------------------------<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150516061807/https://stripe.com/bitcoin" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150516061807/https://stripe.co...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-pierre-auguste-renoir-1841-1919-6190579/" rel="nofollow">https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-pierre-auguste-renoir-1...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://snowmetrics.com/shop/voile-shovel/" rel="nofollow">https://snowmetrics.com/shop/voile-shovel/</a>
Important to note that Stripe has NOT announced any crypto/blockchain/NFT products or tech of its own.<p>The only news here is that Stripe is letting crypto companies use their various fiat processing services, now that they feel comfortable that they can legally do so. Confirmed by pc's comment [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629169" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629169</a>
Just last year Stripe wouldn't even allow any crypto business to be their customers. You could not use Stripe if you business was crypto related. A client of mine had to switch implementation to checkout.com because of that. I wonder what changed...
It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in.<p>Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets are insufficient, and NFTs minted on sidechains inevitably migrate to Mainnet, where they're just as environmentally destructive as any other NFT, or they fail.<p>Stripe's carbon recapture efforts seem to be in the same category. Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. If Stripe's support of crypto increases the use of blockchains, the overall impact of extra carbon emissions could very easily outpace all the carbon recapture they'll ever achieve.<p>It's a shame. When Stripe announced their carbon recapture efforts, I was impressed by how sincere they seemed in finding solutions to climate problems. Next to Stripe Crypto, however, it appears to just be greenwashing.<p>(And to head off the replies, I know all about proof-of-stake, but it's not relevant here. I'm unconvinced it will work, and even if it does, the ecological damage done and being done in the meantime is massive. If Stripe really cared about carbon emissions, they'd wait to launch Stripe Crpyto only on proof-of-stake blockchains, and only after they proved that the energy usage at scale was similar to the energy use for transferring fiat currency.)
This is unrelated to the specific story, but as more and more companies and people I respect get involved with it, the more I realize I need to have a working knowledge of Crypto Currency so at the very least I can be involved in the discussion.<p>Does anyone have any good resources for learning the building blocks/vocabulary of Crypto Currency?
Am very glad to see this - was considering adding Coinbase's Commerce product due to quite a few requests to accept BTC payments for our hardware at <a href="https://kubesail.com" rel="nofollow">https://kubesail.com</a> - I suppose we have an extremely privacy focused user-base currently. Since we already use Stripe, I would be very glad to simply "enable bitcoin" as a payment method and leave it at that.<p>Somewhat sadly, I was quite involved in web3 several years ago when the web3.js project was very young - so I have mixed feelings about being glad "someone else is gonna handle it for me". I suppose in the last 5 years I've gone from "Not your keys, not your coins!" to "I just don't want to spend a ton of time on this". Does that mean crypto has failed to live up to the dream or does that mean it's finally boring enough for old-business-owner-me to make use of it? I can't quite decide!<p>I am a former Stripe employee, so I am <i>quite</i> biased, but I'll just say: In my experience, if the Collison brothers do anything - you'd be a fool to think it's not extremely well thought out. If I hear a rhyme I assume there is a damn good reason.
> Build your crypto business with Stripe<p>I would hesitate building any business on Stripe. However, if you are considering using Stripe Crypto, build the integration it in a way that you can easily migrate away.<p>We built our credit card processing and invoicing on Stripe. We've only processed $2.5m and now we are migrating away. We are 2 months into the migration.<p>It's worth the migration cost, working with Stripe has been an absolute nightmare. Really wish we had built our billing system differently... and not with Stripe.
This page is more useful: <a href="https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-and-availability-by-region" rel="nofollow">https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-a...</a><p>Basically can sell crypto for KYC backed cash in the US. No credit cards. No paying in crypto?
Things like this where companies reinvent traditional payment processing “but with crypto” is the antithesis of what crypto used to stand for.<p>As a former believer in the original goal of private p2p digital cash, I am saddened by what crypto has become in practice.<p>Crypto is just centralized as the traditional financial system.<p>Oh and nobody actually uses it as a currency. I feel like I’m one of few who’s actually purchased goods/services.
Just recently moved from Stripe to Paddle after realizing their new tax collection stuff locked out a bunch of my customers--it only supports credit card transactions, not Apple Pay or Google or any of the EU payment options, and Stripe has no ETA on fixing this. With the tax bits, I still have to file and worry about thresholds too, so I switched to Paddle. On top of completely eliminating the tax remittance crap, I also have PayPal support now (highly requested by customers, especially international).
I skimmed the landing page. It looks like a collection of existing products and they are saying here’s how you could build on ramp and off ramp products.
They are basically saying use our product to handle fiat currency and the customers. And once fiat leg of transaction is complete it’s upto you to manage the crypto part.
I don’t see anything Crypto specific product here. For example, custodial Wallet as a solution.
Am I missing something super obvious?
I’m a long time crypto skeptic, but maybe I am turning my ship around a bit. It’s very conflicting subject because I bought btc out of spite in 2010 to prove a point to my friend that deflationary currency makes no sense. I guess the jokes on me.<p>The whole thing was a pure toy. Way more than doge coin or NFTs are today. I got 2K btc with the money I usually put to vanguard monthly.<p>Through out the years I’ve kept my view that the whole thing is a joke, but not so funny anymore. Going mainstream did nothing good to the scene and rising price created this current eco-catastrophe.<p>Yet this year is the first I actually used crypto as it was intended to transfer value instead of just cashing out. Defi and NFTs are not yet useful for me but the discussions around ethereum development are super interesting and keep pushing forward regardles of cryptobro scene.<p>I used to think that maybe this is similar to early web era, but now I shifted to think that we are possibly in the vacuum tube era of cryptocurrencies.<p>At least now it looks like this thing will outlive me. It sure didn’t look that way earlier. When price crashed it somehow felt right, but it never stayed there.<p>Writing post like this is probably the final top signal X)
I'm sure this will go very differently from the last cryptocurrency bubble, where a whole bunch of merchants started accepting them, just to realize half a year later that beneath the hype, nobody was really interested in using these so-called currencies as an actual currency and quietly shelved it.
Stop flagging my legitimate concern and questions about the scam that are Crypto/NFTs market<p>Are you guys CCP agents trying to censor the people against this scam?<p>You want the news but not the concerns? c'mon lol<p>---<p>That's very sad, this should be banned
Why should people accept money created out of thin air and speculation?<p>Why let that kind of criminal money into the economy?<p>Now america amassed ton of stock (coinbase, paypal and the plethora of other services), who really owns crypto coins nowadays?<p>This stuff smells bad, and yes, it should be banned<p>Shame on anyone who participate into this giant, state organized crime against the economy<p>Poor people won't realize they became even poorer because someone's random NFT picturing a $5 pixel art picture from Fiver, is worth more than their house
When can I accept crypto payments for products and services with Stripe?<p>I don’t expect this to have a lot of volume from the start, but it’s important that payment platforms like Stripe start accepting cryptocurrency so this can get bigger.
My respect for Stripe plummeted when I reached out about a closed API and got a passive aggressive answer from support.<p>I don't think I've ever gotten that kind of rude sarcasm/passive aggression from a simple support inquiry, and I vowed never to use their services again.<p>Their competitors to this specific API were much nicer to work with and onboarded us after some basic introductions, so part of me wonders what other fronts Stripe has better but less well known competitors on.
This doesn't come as surprising since they have timed this with Biden's executive order on regulating cryptocurrencies, so this is probably why you are seeing Stripe pushing Crypto right now.<p>Also, all smaller cryptocurrency on ramp businesses are doomed.
I'm failing to understand what this is.<p>Is stripe adding crypto support to the existing API (USD, EUR, and now some crypto coins). Or are they just allowing crypto businesses to accept fiat?
The main point of crypto these days appears to be to replace the current middlemen with different middlemen who can make more profit while offering the consumer much less legal protection.<p>It's a bit concerning.
I just spent 12 months investigating crypto. I bought come coins, got lucky on that ENS airdrop, made a smart contract, bought an NFT, learned some Solidity, joined some Discords, listen to some podcasts, set up a miner and generally tried to learn about this area.<p>2 weeks ago I left all but one discord, unfollowed all Web3 specific accounts on Twitter and stopped looking at Binance etc.<p>My life has improved considerably. I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.<p>I’m ok missing the boat if it turns out to be any more than a raft. My sanity and concentration is worth far more than whatever rubbish they are all peddling.
They forgot to update their terms of service.<p>> Prohibited Businesses<p>> You must not use Stripe’s services for the following activities:<p>> * Pyramid schemes<p>> * ‘Get rich quick’ schemes<p>> * No value added services<p>> * Predatory investment opportunities
Oh please. Long time Stripe fan and customer here - this makes me sad from the inside. They even mention NFT marketplaces - scams all over the places. Why would they want to support use cases like that?
I find the sheer volume of anger and hatred surrounding this and other related announcements completely unhinged. Why are so many people threatened by services that give their users options?
Slight tangent: Maybe it’s just me, but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the label “crypto” being co-opted as official shorthand for cryptocurrencies. I see how it’s a natural truncation of a long term, but to many of us the word crypto can mean many other things. When I saw the headline, I wondered if they had released their own cryptographic library or something else to that effect.
This is an obvious but very powerful move by Stripe. Stripe is attempting to allow any business to become a place you can buy crypto, which will be really important to remove Coinbase and other CEXs as the only consumer-facing platforms where you can get into the ecosystem.<p>Of course, that just means replacing those CEXs with Stripe as the fully centralized service on the backend, and you can bet they'll be taking their cut! But anything that moves more money into crypto is good for the Web3 ecosystem. Which would, of course, only be a good thing if you considered growth of the Web3 ecosystem a good thing :)