Skip to content

Comment on Ask HN: Where do you spend Bitcoins?parent

Comments

Afaik Bitpay basically guarantee the what you get as a merchant. Your price your stuff in US$ and it's converted to Bitcoin at the checkout at a rate they are willing to sell them at (presumably on the open market)

e.g. I just tried to buy 36 months of reddit gold at $89.97, which came up as 0.10454514 BTC = $860/BTC... which is almost exactly the trading rate on Bitstamp.

Yeah, but you have to pretty much turn that money back into cash ASAP if the value of BTC is dropping, or else someone pays you 1 BTC for something and that's worth ~$800 one day and $100 another. If it's just in an account, you've lost a lot of value, right?

You can use bitcoin as a payment network so that you have zero bitcoin price exposure. Truly none.

For example, with BitPay your POS terminal tells a price denominated in USD to BitPay, (BitPay quotes a bitcoin-denominated price to the customer with a unique address and the customer pays), and then BitPay tells the merchant the payment came through. BitPay credits the merchant account the USD-denominated value. At the end of the day, BitPay settles up the account (eg. ACH payment to merchant bank account).

Never does the merchant hold bitcoins.

Tbh, I thought Bitpay did all that for you.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.