Bitcoin

Why would a company be interested in accepting bitcoin?

Lower transaction fees

• Depending on whether a company decides to keep funds as bitcoin or use an intermediary like bitpay or coinbase, fees will range from a fraction of a cent to a high of around 1%. Credit card rates are often over 3%.
• If sending payment from another country there is no risk of funds being delayed and no conversion fees levied.

Lower risk

• There’s no chargeback risk. A fradulent buyer/client cannot reverse payment after services are delivered. Services like PayPal will often side with the buyer and due to terms of service their decisions are final.
• Funds cannot be frozen/seized by a bank or payment service due to bank policy. For a small business having their accounts frozen can have a devistating effect. These can be made in error or simply because a transaction looked unusual.* Our company once had our debit cards invalidated for opening a small payment dispute with a vendor over a mischarge. The bank’s logic was “if it happened once, it could happen again, so better change all card numbers”, this was done without notice, and we had to spend multiple days correcting our accounts.
• If a customer needs to prove they send payment in court, they can use the blockchain’s record. Each transaction creates a transaction id they can use to show the entry, additionally they can prove they own the sending bitcoin address by cryptographically “signing” a short message with the sending address.

Faster posting, Reliable network

• Bitcoin transactions appear like a credit card’s nearly immediately, and post usually within about 10 minutes 24/7 and 365 days a year. This allows a company shipping goods to be able to wait until fully cleared payment before shipping (or providing a virtual service such as hosting). For point-of-sale merchants, they will still see the transaction but usually will not wait to post (similar to with credit cards). This usually does not pose a large concern to merchants doing face-to-face transactions.
• Because the network is distributed around the world without a central location, outages don’t happen. The worst that happens is a minor fluctuation in posting time, blocks can take up to a half hour.

Flexible design

• While the basic design of the network has remained the same, many developers continue to work on improving the core client and adding new features to the blockchain through Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). These have added features like built-in escrow and a newer wallet design that allows for all addresses to be generated from a long phrase of words.

How can we help?

• We can enable bitcoin acceptance on ecommerce sites directly or via Bitpay or Coinbase’s merchant API’s. This allows businesses to choose whether they want to store and use bitcoin or just use it as a drop-in payment system.
• We can offer guidance in implementing bitcoin acceptance at point of sale
• We can help businesses learn how to purchase bitcoin and pay their vendors with it. Individuals are often interested in learning how to use a bitcoin wallet and guidelines on how to properly secure their funds.
• We can answer questions and concerns, this page is by no means comprehensive, feel free to drop us a line if you want to know more.