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Comment by maxmalysh | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin.

How many payments have you processed? I thought Bitcoin died as a payment medium.

People have figured out that the overhead is only about $0.50 if you're willing to wait, but most consumer apps don't make it easy to default to the lower fee.

(I haven't looked into this for some time, so that last paragraph is a bit dated.)

It is worth mentioning that today "you're willing to wait" actually means just some minutes.

I've actually started using BitCoin to pay for things recently and I was surprised to find out how easy and quick this actually is. This really is a no-bullshit electronic cash. No registration, no verification, no borders, quick and easy. I hope more goods and services are going to be offered for cryptocurrencies in future.

How do you deal with the price volatility?

I don't use crypto for business and don't store much money this way (which would mean I have to plan) so far so I ignore it and I'm Ok. In fact I have only been affected by it in the positive way: I had insufficient BitConins to buy what I needed (not illegal) and planned to buy more but the rate grew quickly and I found myself in possession of sufficient value before I had time to bother.

On the Ethereum blockchain, things are a little easier. You can always use a stabletoken like DAI.

On the BTC blockchain, this can be a real problem. The best one can do is to hope that the BTC price doesn't swing more than the equivalent fee amount of a credit card transaction to make it worthwhile.

If you are willing to keep some of your crypto on an exchange (but remember, it is only really your crypto if you have the keys), you can try to automate the swap between BTC<-> stablecoin to reduce the exposure to price swings.

I use CryptoWoo plugin for BTC payments and I use KyberSwap WooCommerce plugin for erc20 payments, you can select if you want to convert to DAI at checkout. BTC I just take the risk and believe it will keep appreciating in value over time.

We've processed over $200k in orders with over $100k being in BTC and ETH payments since 2017. Crypto merchandise website.

For smaller payments, say under $100 worth, the lightning network works great. It takes only a few seconds to complete, costs fractions of a cent, and is divisible to the millisatoshi (there are 100M satoshis per 1 BTC).

At Olodolo.com we process a few payments a day through CoinPayments. Haven't had any issues.

Lightning is changing that, and hopefully Ethereum's Raiden will soon be released and bring the possibility to use stablecoins for off-chain transfers as well.

Disclaimer and shameless plug: I was working on Raiden last year and now I am working on a self-hosted payment gateway that can leverage Raiden (https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20)

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