Namecheap now officially accepts Bitcoin
namecheap.com
namecheap.com
I filled in my domain, got to the checkout page, and it gave me three options: Pay from 'Funds', 'Credit Card', or 'Paypal'. Turns out in order to pay with Bitcoin, you have to first add 'Funds' to your account. So I click the link to do that, it asks me how much I want to add (I don't know, aren't you supposed to tell me how much I owe?). Anyway, I follow a few pages and finally end up on BitPay's page where it asks me to send a specific number of Bitcoins to their address, so I do. The page recognizes immediately when I have sent the funds, and redirects me back to Namecheap.
Great, now I can find my way back to the checkout page and finally finish the transfer! Except I can't. Despite having sent the funds, they won't show up in my account for another hour (or possibly up to 24 hours). I understand they want to prevent double spend attacks, but this is absurd. We're talking about a $10 domain that they can just revoke if the payment doesn't clear. They have to wait 45+ days for paypal/credit cards to clear, but they give the product to me immediately, and I don't have to go through their ridiculous fund adding process to do so.
I applaud the effort Namecheap and I'm happy to see Bitcoin becoming more useful, but this needs work.
However, even with that fixed, it's still an issue that Bitcoin was not an option on the checkout page. I had to navigate somewhere else, then go through the checkout process again just to get back to where I was. I shouldn't have to stop what I'm doing and go through a completely different flow to pay for something.
Their interface really needs a make over though. It's like they are trying to win a "Show As Much Information As Possible in A Single Screen contest".
... and after one hour transactions are marked as "invalid" and you are forced to fill ticket to tech support (which is nonworking either)
This is not a thing. There's no concept of 'clearing' when it comes to credit cards; they are authorized for a specific dollar amount or they aren't. If a merchant authorizes $10 for a domain name, it's guaranteed that those funds are theirs (and they're given an authorization code confirming it). They more than likely get the funds in their bank account the very next business day.
The only way the money can be taken back from the merchant is if the consumer does a chargeback with their bank, so the only concern there is fraud.
Also, I happen to be a previous Namecheap customer with a credit card attached to my account. If the Bitcoin payment had failed, they could have just charged my account/credit card to avoid their loss (possibly with some extra legal annoyances, but I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with that).
I think back to the "So, that's the end of Bitcoin"[1] article by Forbes and chuckle to myself. Hopefully one day we can look back at that article in the same way we look back at Ballmer laughing at the iPhone [2]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/20/so-thats-...
I realize PR departments are probably flailing wildly over $33 bitcoins, but which feature do you think your users are more likely to use?
Meaning that once it hits a certain level people will start cashing in and crash the price again?
However, with the recent movements, I wouldn't be surprised if BQ swings dozens of percentage points in the next few weeks.
Only if they all sell at the same time. I don't see why that would happen. Selling ones bitcoins isn't an event you coordinate with other holders of bitcoins. It will happen gradually, and have a dampening effect on the price. In all likelihood it's happening right now. There was a huge ask wall at $40. Seems like a lot of people wanted to take profit at that price.
This is also why a crash doesn't happen. If everyone decided right now they've made enough money and wanted to sell their coins, the price would start dropping, until it reaches a point where people are no longer satisfied with the price, and they will stop selling. At which point some buyers will be satisfied with the price drop, and get into bitcoin again, thus raising the price, and the cycle continues.
It's really fascinating to watch the sum total of the actions of all the sellers and buyers, and how it unfolds as an ever-changing price and order book.
Really, a debit card card purchased with cash would probably work just as well, but there are imaginable situations where the risk of losing the domain is less of a problem than being identified as the registrant.
I keep valid contact information in the WHOIS records for my domains, and all I get out of it is e-mail spam from my registrar, e-mail spam from everyone else, snail mail spam from my registrar, snail mail spam from competing registrars (Domain Registry of America, anyone?), "SELL YOUR DOMAIN TO US!" robocall spam, and yearly ICANN WDRP e-mails from my registrar.
Free for just the first year after transferring/registering a domain, after that it costs you.
• who you have to "provide […] truthful, complete, current, accurate and reliable contact details" to,
• who "has the right to disclose your identity and your other Personal Information" and
• who "may resolve any and all third party claims, whether threatened or made, arising out of your registration or use of the Domain"
Now for a lot of people who just don't want their name easily visible, that's fine because it's unlikely these terms will be acted on. But for anyone who actually needs anonymity, to protect their right to free speech (for example), that's not good enough.
That's why they "spam" you once a year, reminding you to keep the registrant information up to date.
I have not heard of anyone losing their generic TLD in a random check, but the risk always exist.
I imagine in the future internet, domain registrations will be just as anonymous (like .onion on tor) as bitcoin, no reason domain names can't be decentralized (different tld's of course).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_...
I really don't see how they can do that anonymously and still function. They will be constantly fighting scammers and spammers.
Regardless, I am excited that there are more places to spend Bitcoin each and every day.
It has mostly a transactional since the use cases are so niche.
This is a first-world misperception. There is half a world excluded from traditional payment methods.
edit: I just tried it. The workflow works well, but this brings me back to my biggest reservation about the usability of BitCoin for regular transactions: The long period (hours) to confirm a transaction.
It only takes about 10 minutes for a new registration to go live with most registrars. If you set your DNS servers during the purchase and have the zones ready from the get-go, your domain is resolving on the web immediately.
twitch :-)
Also, for something revocable like a domain name, there's nothing preventing Namecheap from giving you the domain name immediately, and then revoking your access to it later if the transaction ultimately fails.
Not according to shiftpgdn:
> NameCheap actually doesn't have the capacity to revoke domains as they're an eNom reseller. Enom's policy is that once you buy a domain, it's yours. With domains sales being such a low margin business I can understand their level of caution.
I love that over time people start coming up with solutions to the same damn problems that other payment schemes have already come up with, and that last week they were saying were evil because someone else was doing it.
It's not unique to bitcoin, you see it in all sorts of places, it is funny though.
The barrier to entry in the payment card industry is simply too high to allow much competition. Entering the business of bitcoin payment processing has an extremely low barrier to entry; all the hard stuff has been done already!
But when people then layer payment schemes and payment-scheme type-assurances, services and (of course) fees on top of it, is it wrong to make this comparison?
Because at the moment you see a lot of people touting the 'no fees' part as the reason it wins over credit/debit cards, but when the weaknesses of that are pointed out someone like yourself inevitably pops up to tell us that of course it's not meant for that, but payment systems can be layered over the top, with a fee structure. Or it's silly to expect that because it's just like cash, when the expectation is in response to a BTC advocates claim that it's the best thing evar for the problem domain.
Basically it can't be both ways and I am kinda tired of the constant claims that it is.
I don't understand the currency so maybe I'm overpricing.
Paying bills over the internet was easier and simpler than paying by check. Paying by credit and debit cards are easier, safer and simpler than using say Bitcoin.
There is zero chance that those cards are going anywhere. If anything the popularity of PayWave and other NFC technologies should see their use increase.
Online merchants will absorb the cost of processing credit cards, as they aren't going to wait for a check in the mail. But physical merchants that can accept cash and are now allowed to recoup that 3%? I can see certain groups of people migrating away from plastic if it increases the cost of their goods/services in a meaningful way.
Not possible with Bitcoin.
(they'd be pretty useless if they did, anyway- where would my refund money come from?)
Almost sounds like you're confusing escrow with insurance?
Your refund would come from the middle guy entrusted to securing your funds until your goods were delivered as promised. If your goods are not delivered, or if what you ordered was nothing like what was promised, the escrow service would simply send your bitcoins back to you, instead of sending them to the merchant who tried to defraud you.
These services would likely charge a transaction fee for the service.
Even silk road offers an escrow service that is apparently effective enough. The scammers on silk road typically try to con you into closing the transaction before delivery of any goods, so one red flag that you may be looking at a scammer is a number of early settled transactions in their history.
If someone wanted to do something like this more mainstream, they could develop a third party bitcoin escrow service that offered an order history, rating or feedback system, and transaction comments from both parties. You could even develop a rating score formula similar to a credit score, where older accounts with more history, have higher scores, which make it much harder for scammers to use throw away accounts.
The way I see it Bitcoins are not stable / safe enough for large transactions and the transaction fees on small transactions are effectively meaningless.
You do realise that credit cards aren't some new invention ?
The merchant costs have been factored into people's purchases for decades and there is no evidence it has caused any impact on sales. If anything the huge array of reward programs and partnerships e.g. with airlines has reinvigorated the huge of credit cards.
I just don't see anyone migrating away from credit/debit cards apart from fringe elements of society. Seems like proponents of Bitcoin live in their own world sometimes and treat the existing financial system as some competitor.
BitPay's site says an incoming bitcoin transfer to bank deposit costs 1.70% for USD on their "Pricing" page: https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-direct-deposit
And this will only decrease as competition increases.
No chargeback possibility? No sale from me.
To be fair, registering a .com domain is a bad idea if you want to stay anonymous. Go for a .is, a .ch or even a .eu.
It`s not about anonymity. All other payment systems just suck.
Radius from earth to the edge of the visible universe: 46.5 billion light years, http://geology.com/records/deepest-part-of-the-ocean.shtml
Satoshi Nakamoto: a human being or beings
I know what you are trying to say, "why ask unanswerable questions", but all questions have answers.
Amir Taaki
I am not familiar with operating a DNS server. Would that accomplish the usecase I described above? I would like to set up the same system but with a domain I own and not the free one from afraid.org
Maybe in the US. In the civilised world it can be pretty much instantaneous.
What if bitcoin drops and I fill register domains on the cheap? Is there a way to prevent this? Are the prices somehow pegged to the dollar?
"It does not matter how many bitcoins we collect, how long it takes to collect them, what we can sell them for, or how long it takes to sell them."
If the seller and the payment provider quickly convert their bitcoins into USD -- as seems likely to be the case based on the link in Maxious's reply -- then they're minimizing the time interval during which their wealth is exposed to exchange rate fluctuations.
_____~10000000 (10 million) dollars in bitcoin transactions a day [1] verses
~5000000000000 (5 trillion) dollars in daily foreign currency trades worldwide. [2]
Especially for a fledgling currency with staunch opposition by traditional bankers and financial markets because it solves a lot of problems that make them a lot of money.
Why? I can just hang on to it for the same return and no risk at all.
This is why BTC loans really don't make sense, to me. Positive interest rates are punitive if the value keeps rising, negative ones pointless.
And also bitfinex.com but generally they are not perceived well.
(haven't used them myself)
You can short BTC on Bitcoinica... oh wait.
I like bitcoins just like everyone, but there are laws you need to abide by and bitcoins are illegal in many countries.
Bitcoin itself may not be illegal, but the encryption schemes may be illegal for private citizens to use in some countries, especially ones that don't want their citizens communicating in secret.
I pasted the law and even a case to some other replies, I wouldn't just throw that if it wasn't true.
Like I said, obviously you should do what you think is best for your business. I just don't think it's fair to imply that NameCheap are forcing liability on people without hard evidence.
There are many laws here that forbids using any currency that's not the national one, from consumer's laws to financial laws.
1) By your interpretation, there's a law in Brazil that prohibits the use of any currency that is not Brazil's national currency.
2) Because Bitcoin is not Brazil's national currency, you are now worried because NameCheap is now using Bitcoin, and will drop your company accounts with them.
So my main question is: why weren't you worried when Namecheap started accepted US Dollars (i.e., since their founding)? After all USD are not Brazil's national currency. Does this law distinguish between USD and other currencies? This is not the case according to the case you cited.
Most importantly, the law you refer to above, and the case you cited, all seem to involve government payments. And you've cited no other specific laws, other than this one (LEI Nº 4.595, DE 31 DE DEZEMBRO DE 1964), which is basically the law governing the establishment of a national currency. So according to this law, you have to pay the Government of Brazil in Brazilian currency (reales) for taxes, government contracts, etc. This is entirely reasonable; the US Government has a similar law. In the US, at least, this law does not outlaw the use of other currencies. And since multinational corporations do business in USD in Brazil every day of the week, it seems to me extremely unlikely that this outlaws the use of foreign currencies in Brazil. You just can't pay Brazilian government taxes or for other government services in other currencies.
As far as I am concerned, until you tell us where your country is, it seems your trying to damage namecheap's and /or Bitcoin's reputation for no reason.
Please provide the country and law cited. Cheers.
Perhaps he was referring to this?
http://silvervigilante.com/bitcoin-attacked-by-brazils-secur...
This is the law that complete forbids using any currency other than the national for internal commerce and disposes about how forex must work, which bitcoins do not comply.
http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/LEIS/L4595.htm
This is a case where people were using dollars to pay for national contracts:
http://jus.com.br/revista/texto/8566/da-impossibilidade-de-p...
Surely you can buy a wordpress account with USD without being arrested? What makes buying wordpress / namecheap with Bitcoin any different? Or maybe i'm misunderstanding something. (Honest I probably am missing something, this happens to me a lot :)
Yes, they are. Any currency other than the national currency cannot be used for commerce.
This is a case where people were using dollars to pay for national contracts:
http://jus.com.br/revista/texto/8566/da-impossibilidade-de-p...
The only kind of parallel currency that is acceptable under the law are called 'social currencies' which are just food stamps.
Contains links to laws in the US that can be used against bitcoins:
http://www.usmint.gov/consumer/?action=archives#NORFED
Thesis showing that most parallel currencies are illegal (including in the US):
http://repositorio.bce.unb.br/bitstream/10482/9485/1/2011_Ma...
Bank Palmas created a 'social currency', it is a crime here, they escaped jail in 2003, but then in 2011 things got ugly:
http://empreendedorsocial.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2012/07/11/um...