Payment Processor Stripe officially announced on Tuesday that they are to phase-out support for Bitcoin in April. This move comes as a bit of a shock to some in the crypto community, as Lightning Network, a major improvement to Bitcoin's system is on the main network and reports of it's success are spreading throughout the community.
So questions remain as to what is going on here. Multiple media outlets, from Business Insider to Coindesk are reporting this news in similar fashion. Of course the headline grabs attention, but it's hard to think that Stripe is giving up on Bitcoin long-term. That is why I urge people to actually read the official blog post from Stripe Product Manager, Tom Karlo.
https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
Most everybody acknowledges the issues with Bitcoin right now but information that is being shared from developers and those that are currently running lightning nodes, a tenet of the lightning network, are optimistic about Bitcoin. Which leads me to another point. Tom Karlo points to other projects he is keen on, like Stellar, Litecoin, and even Bitcoin Cash, which is why it's easy to think maybe they are taking one eye off of Bitcoin as these other projects appear at the moment to be more viable.
We at Phuture Gains will continue to follow this story.
I believe the Lightning network and atomic swaps are eventually going to lead to a surge in BTC and LTC prices, so I'm anxious for Lightning to go mainstream. That will completely change the game for Bitcoin, which admittedly is relatively useless for small transactions at the moment. Hopefully Stripe will see the case for adding support for LTC, BCH and XLM, even if they temporarily cut off Bitcoin. Resteemed.
From what I gathered from the Stripe blog was that the decision is purely a financial one at this point. BTC is not as viable for everyday payments so they are looking at LTC, BCH, and possibly others, to fill the void. My aim was to point this out before people just read the headlines and it gets used as another cheap Bitcoin bashing tool. Everybody who is pro-crypto should be rooting for Bitcoin to succeed.
Nice article! I think that maybe Bitcoin shouldn’t be used as a currency, and maybe should be thought of as not one. Definitely following and upvoting!
Bitcoin keeps getting further away from a platform where anyone can run a node and process their transactions for little or no cost. Hopefully that is why they are dropping support. Lighting network will make it even more centralized, similar to how ripple works. Which sure, it saves banks money, but that isn't the point.
Cryptocurrencies are supposed to decentralize money exchange, so you don't have to trust (and pay) a middleman.
Really, did they?
What else is there for us?
What do you suggest?
... again another payment gateway who realize that BTC is not a option for online payment... why you should pay with bitcoin when its take more tan 2hr? I would prefer to use my credit card instead.... A lot of big corpos are falling into this well known but useless crypto. So far the best feature of BTC is the investment... They should use crypto currencies like monero, sumokoin, bytecoin, etc... They payment process is fast, untraceable and again fast....