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Comment by trevordev | Hacker News Reader

BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding to my emails. I will not use bitpay in the future.

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Yeah, prize disbursements were handled terribly. My team won BitPay's prize at AngelHack SF, contacted them repeatedly, and were told to wait until all AngelHacks were over before anything would be done. Months and months later it arrived this week. We actually avoided BitPay intentionally at a couple hackathons after since no one was sure if they were just scammers or not.

That said, I had no problem with their API. They had an easy web checkout link that could be generated that worked fine in an Android WebView for my first implementation. Later at AngelHack SV I used their PHP API to generate invoices for specific prices for goods dynamically and was then still able to send people to their site to finish checkout and get redirected when it completed.

Didn't really see any missing documentation and their site worked fine, responding quite quickly when money was sent to the barcode it showed or the link that could start a wallet app on Android, and their PHP sample code worked trivially. Who knows, maybe they've improved the docs and samples since you used it, though. Or you were trying to hack bitcore, which is a completely different level of difficulty.

Congrats for winning. What was your hack? What hack won at SV?

Hey, Eric with BitPay here. If you're still waiting on information about AngelHack, email me: eric@bitpay.com

We just this past week launched our new REST API, which should be significantly better than our old API: http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/09/18/announcing-the-new-bitpay-... – we spent a long time thinking very carefully about making the developer experience as smooth as possible, but I'm sure there are things we can be doing better. If you've any ideas on how we can improve it, please let me know.

BitAuth is an overly complex system that's seriously standing in the way of mass developer adoption.

http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/01/bitauth-for-decentralized-...

Hey Rygu! We really appreciate the feedback – we're doing everything we can to make working with Bitcoin extremely simple. What can we do to reduce the complexity?

Less complexity.

So after many months the winning teams have not yet gotten their btc?

I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless.

Regarding your AngelHack prize... the same thing happened to me. I'd be more skeptical of AngelHack than Bitpay, a well-funded global company, though: http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-angelhack-lawsuit...

It's not the first time I've heard of AngelHack not following through.

Hey Tony! Great work on your Go implementation of BitAuth: https://github.com/codelittinc/gobitauth – would you mind sending me an email about your AngelHack issues? eric@bitpay.com

Hey Eric! Thanks for the heads up, will send you an email now.

Hah... that library was awesome to work on. Ended up reimplementing the signature algorithm before getting a library that lets us use golang's built in ecdsa libs. Not clever!

Love BitAuth. It's super easy to use and works brilliantly.

I'm developing an app now, where bitcoin payments are part of it. I decided to try bitpay rather than running bitciond myself (less chance to fuck up) but their API is horribly hard to use, gives inconsistent errors and the docs are awful at best.

I'm using their old version, but the errors I get are from the new version. Their library for the language I use is not yet updated. The new docs seem to be better, but I lost faith in them as a developer.

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. What language are you using, and what errors are you getting?

Always feel free to shoot me an email at eric@bitpay.com.

I've worked with insight and bitcore, which are both Bitpay developed. Very positive experience with both of them.

Sounds like a great match for Paypal

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