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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Holy shamoly! This is incredible! I'm actually checking to make sure it's not Apr 1. I'm beyond-amazed at the sheer breadth of this list. I mean, PayPal itself only supports 20-odd currencies, I think.

I mean, the Brazilian Real? Literally almost no payment processors support that. And believe me, I've looked for them.

This is amazing news.

(As a side question, if anybody from Stripe is listening here: how exactly is this done -- via partnerships with local banks, or via dynamic currency conversion? I ask because, in the case of DCC, you will find that there are big problems involved with Brazil specifically, and many legitimate transactions will be refused. Brazil is a very special case, and calling the BRL a supported currency could mean very many different things.)

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I dont't think Stripe is being misleading, but many people might be overstating the importance of this feature.

Even without this conversion, you can always (try to) accept payments denominated in U$ from people with Brazil-issued (or Uzbekistan etc) cards. Say you charge 10USD for a product. You get paid (10-fees)USD. Later the issuing bank will convert (say) 10USD into 20BRL and the customer will pay in BRL as usual. But the customer doesn't know beforehand what is the exact exchange rate, so at the time of the purchase they don't exactly how much it will cost them in BRL.

With currency conversion, you can instead charge some of your customers in BRL. In this case, the customer knows exactly how much the cost will be in BRL. Instead, the USD value you get becomes variable. But this doesn't solve the problem of Brazilian (or Uzbekistan) banks denying the payment (due to fraud prevention or because they aren't connected to Stripe's acquirers or whatever), and it doesn't solve the problem of accepting payments via Stripe as a Brazilian-based merchant.

(To be clear, this is not a critique of Stripe)

The breadth of this list is helped by including currencies that aren't being used by anyone. For example both EEK (Estonian Kroon) and LVL (Latvian Lats) aren't in use, as both countries are actually in the eurozone and use EUR.

For a BRL charge the transaction will still be to a US merchant, rather than a local merchant. You're right that in some countries like Brazil, this can be a bit hit-or-miss.

Bummer.

But it is still amazing that BRL is supported at all, given the insane regulations.

BitPay supports over 150: https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-exchange-rates

Braintree's had 130+ for a while: https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/ruby/reference/curren...

They even support the Venezuelan Bolivar, which is under a very strict currency exchange restriction (venezuelans can only spend $300 online per year).

I'm guessing that this will still be charged in dollars, but still its very impressive!

Places with restricted conversion for regular citizens will also have a discrepancy between the official exchange rate and what people pay on the street. In recent history the difference has been roughly 30% in Venezeula, and 100000% in Zimbabwe. Caveat emptor.

Actually the black market rate right now in Venezuela is even bigger. Around 650%

The official rate is 11.3 Bs/$ (or 6.3 depending on what exchange the govt decides you fall under.)

The black market rate today closed at around Bs.85/$

I'm guessing the only way to pay through Stripe with a venezuelan card is one which is approved by the govt to spend their alloted yearly $300.

Well PayFlow says it supports 190 markets (does that mean currencies?)

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/payflow-faq

They list the currencies at the end of that page; there are only 22 there.

Thank you!

PayPal lets you keep the money in the currency you charged. Doesn't seem like Stripe allows this, and insists on the 2% conversion fee.

still at least its available to merchants almost everywhere..

Yes we have had this problem with many seemingly fine BRL transactions being refused. Given the small volume we do just gave up on it for now and charge them in USD.

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