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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

Given the volatility, probably price fluctuations is the main risk. That could have an upside or a downside for a seller.

The seller would also have to trust bitpay (who it seems shopify are using) to store the coins securely, but that's really just like trusting any other payment provider, and hopefully bitpay have insurance and proper financial controls, unlike many exchanges.

Great to see this happening though - I wonder what the comparison on fees is between accepting bitcoin and credit cards, have the fees just moved from one provider (mastercard say) to another (bitpay), or are they significantly lower?

Is there anyone here accepting bitcoin who can enlighten us on the pros and cons?

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I am not accepting bitcoin or using BitPay but the fees seem to be much lower than any credit card: https://bitpay.com/pricing

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by price fluctuations. BitPay accepts bitcoin from the customer and automatically converts it to the seller's local currency at market price. So the price is always fair and the seller never deals with bitcoin.

I am not accepting bitcoin or using BitPay but the fees seem to be much lower than any credit card

Sounds good at $30 a month or 1% per transaction, $30 per month almost too good to be true, but I guess they can make it up in volume if they have enough customers sending payments through. The only drawback would be persuading customers to pay in bitcoin, but that could come in time.

Ah I see, thanks for the correction - I'd assumed the seller set a price in bitcoin. Can't see much risk for sellers then if the prices are not set in bitcoin and it goes through a payment processor who moves it immediately to their local currency, and pays out (immediately?). I guess bitpay then has the risk as they have to hold bitcoins till they can sell them and deal with fluctuations in the meantime.

I think the risk for the sellers is that the price fluctuations may exceed Bitpay's ability to smooth them out causing them to go bankrupt.

They use Bitpay, all the incoming transactions are converted to USD automatically.

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