How to accept bitcoin donations on your website | Hacker News Reader

How to accept bitcoin donations on your website

blog.coinbase.com

70 pointsbarmstrong15 comments

Hello HN community, I'm just curious about the rise of this new BitCoin currency. I'm currently developing an Saas product myself, so I'm actually torn between choosing various currency processors/vendors.

Can someone explain as to

1) Why and when one should use BitCoin?

2) What advantages does BitCoin have over traditional payment processors like PayPal/Stripe?

3) Is there any legal downside of using BitCoin? (For example, I read somewhere that Bitcoins are used for Money Laundering and the governments are actively monitoring anyone using BitCoins)

4) How much do you save (if at all) by going with BitCoin instead of someone popular like PayPal/Stripe?

Thanks!

Unless you've got a userbase that are significant users of bitcoin (which I'm guessing is unlikely for most SaaS) I wouldn't worry about supporting it. Wait until you have active demand from your userbase before adding another payment mechanism especially one which essentially gives you a huge amount of forex risk.

Thanks for the clarification :)

Well... I know I might sound a bit rude, but why use coinbase instead of just putting your Bitcoin address online?

Probably to reduce some friction from the process. They also don't charge a transaction fee(as noted in another comment), so i could see myself using this on my site.

Of course a much useful service would be something like flattr. IIRC, There was some talk about them starting to accept bitcoins but i haven't heard about that lately.

And where do you get your Bitcoin address from? Options are: from the official client (many reasons for and against running it), one of the other hosted or local Bitcoin wallets, or Coinbase. Coinbase is an attractive option as it's extremely easy to setup and to cash out the Bitcoin directly into your bank account.

Coinbase has an easy option to convert those Bitcoins into USD on a regular bank account. This might be interesting for people not planning on keeping BTC around but who like the "close to instant" nature of it.

For those wondering to accept Bitcoin or not, the price of Bitcoin has been bullish the past few weeks.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg90zig6-hourztgSzm...

What does that have to do with accepting anonymous donations?

Presumably accepting donations in bitcoins can only be beneficial. Accepting payments may or may not be a different story.

I requested the adjustable donation feature yesterday, thanks! Here is an example of it in action: https://chatsecure.org

One thing I noticed is that very rarely the button image doesn't load and is replaced by a default Bootstrap navigation bar inside the button frame instead. Might be something to investigate.

This could be really cool for this post from earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5141995

Very neat. Is there a demo site of this someplace, outside of the screenshots? Do coinbase still charge a fee?

Demo: https://coinbase.com/docs/merchant_tools/payment_buttons

We charge 1% when you buy or sell bitcoin (by connecting any U.S. bank account). Sending BTC-to-BTC is free (we pay the minimal bitcoin fees on your behalf).

We also released a nice API: https://github.com/coinbase/coinbase-ruby

So there's no fee when a customer buys something from a merchant with bitcoin using the coinbase API?

awesome feature

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