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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

God I hate posts about Stripe with a passion. It's like saying "You've had this pain in your back for the last five years? Well, I've got this miracle pill here that will not only make it go away, but it will also taste great. Oh, you're not in the US? Too bad then."

Stop reminding me I can't use Stripe all the time.

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Stripe is beta testing internationally. I got an account in Canada about 2 weeks ago.

http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-e...

Great to hear, I'm just praying they remove the need for a social security number in the US.

One of the main reasons we chose the US to incorporate in was for access to business tools like this. But with neither founder having a SS number we can't use the service.

If you're signing up as a business, can't you provide an EIN instead of a SSN? I see the box for it in their account settings page, but since I'm using it as an individual, I haven't been able to test whether that works without an SSN.

Unfortunately you need a SSN and EIN.

https://answers.stripe.com/questions/if-i-have-an-ein-do-i-a...

I don't want to speak in Stripe's name but I suggest emailing Stripe and asking for an account based on EIN.

SSN shouldn't be published around since it is a key information to ones digital identity. I guess they do this for clients which are not companies.

The SSN requirement confuses me, especially as a US citizen with a US company. Whose SSN is the right one to use? Are they legally liable for events? Why require a single person's SSN when in reality it's the corporation's account, goes to the corporation's bank account, which the corporation gets charged corporation taxes.

Fantastic, how do I go about applying, do you know?

https://stripe.com/global

Done, thank you.

This is major. So big, I almost have tears running down my face.

That's lovely, and I wish them luck, but having some sort of closed beta is about a million miles away from having a service I can check out to make sure that it works. And by works, I don't just mean payment mechanics and security, I also mean PCI/DSS compliance, EU data protection compliance, VAT handling, financial reporting, and all those other little details that are often completely different here from the US.

So as StavrosK said, can we please lay off the Stripe hype for a while? It's not a viable service for use outside the US, and it's not going to be (at least for any responsible business that isn't willing to bet the company on not getting into tax/regulatory trouble) for a long time.

I don't understand why we should avoid talking about services that produce significant, easily measured uplifts for US companies just because those services aren't available in Europe.

I absolutely understand the frustration being expressed and am not suggesting that these threads are the wrong place to express it. But the idea that we should "lay off the Stripe hype" sounds wrong. It's entirely possible that we're not hyping Stripe enough. Startups need all the help they can get.

To clarify, I don't agree with Silhouette that we should "lay off the hype". If anything, Stripe deserves it. I just hate it because it always reminds me that I can't even try it out.

Apparently I misunderstood what you meant earlier. Apologies if I misrepresented your view.

Oh, that's quite all right, I was just clarifying.

I don't understand why we should avoid talking about services that produce significant, easily measured uplifts for US companies just because those services aren't available in Europe.

Because at this point, it isn't newsworthy, it's really just noise/advertising. It's not as if anyone reading HN who can use Stripe hasn't heard about them many times already. If they launch an actual service that anyone outside the US can sign up for, then great, let's shout from the rooftops. If there is something constructive that the rest of us can do to help them achieve that goal, by all means, let's talk about it. Otherwise, with due respect to Patrick, there isn't really very much new and interesting to discuss in this area and I would prefer that HN concentrate on things that are new and/or interesting (such as the other parts of Patrick's post).

Startups need all the help they can get.

Yes, we do. And if and when a service like Stripe starts to offer it, I'll be all for having the news on HN. But until then, yet another group hug about how wonderful Stripe is followed by yet another round of moaning that it's not available anywhere outside the US and yet another apologetic post from one of the developers saying they're working on it is a bit like reading about every new Firefox release on Slashdot.

"It's not as if anyone reading HN who can use Stripe hasn't heard about them many times already"

I'd heard of them, but I didn't know that their co-founder would run git bisect if you reported a bug. Plus, 350 up votes on this story suggest that it was worth posting on Hacker News.

Sounds like an opportunity to me.

I don't know why this is getting down voted. Stripe is close to my most hated company right now because they're not available in the UK :) It's really annoying.

"Hated", really?

I think he's being ironic. They're "hated" because they're so awesome, yet so very unavailable.

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