[ptbello]

Paypal's crappiness was definitely the leading reason for Stripe.

I wonder what is Strope's stance towards blockchain? Will they now also move into blockchain like PayPal, but properly?

[hamstercat]

They had support for Bitcoin a few years back, merchants could accept Bitcoin in addition to whatever currency they already supported. The feature was killed because they didn't find Bitcoin useful for transactions (can read more about the why here https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support).

[the_arun]

Aren’t cryptocurrencies more like stock rather than a currency? Only difference may be is stocks cannot be exchanged 24 hrs a day?

[oriesdan]

Stripe actually did invest in Stellar [1], so they seem to be interested in cryptocurrencies. This blog post is from 2014, though. It would still be interesting to hear their up to date opinion.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

EDIT: well, hamstercat's link is a great follow up :)

[throwaway-sf]

Was it?

I think people often forget that PayPal has a $250B market cap and is one of the largest companies by valuation in the world...

[anthony_barker]

They helped fund Stellar.org which provides open source blockchain payments software.

[Geee]

Stripe used to have Bitcoin support (since 2014), but they removed it at some point.

[TedDoesntTalk]

PayPal is not giving merchants crypto... just fiat currencies. So this is a half-assed implementation.

Let’s hope stripe does it right (crypto from the buyer and crypto to the seller)

[whatatita]

Half-arsed but entierly on-brand for them; their merchants don't want to accept bitcoin, they want their preferred fiat currency.

Same goes for buying in EUR and the merchant receiving USD. Buyers get to use their preferred currency (now inc. crypto) and merchants receive theirs.

[secfirstmd]

Didn't Stripe used to have Bitcoin and then stop supporting it?

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

[ilaksh]

Hm. So in essence, you would instantly buy crypto through Stripe, and then they would instantly sell it to someone else? Kind of like a middleman or exchange service?

It's so strange to me that people don't see how that is antithetical to the concept of cryptocurrencies.

The right way to do cryptocurrencies is to just let people use cryptocurrencies. But that means watching your business get eaten up by it. Which is why they are trying to insert themselves so that they don't get disrupted out of existence.

[deadbunny]

> Let’s hope stripe does it right (crypto from the buyer and crypto to the seller)

Why would you need a middleman for that? Every crypto is already peer to peer.

[tushonka]

Can't you do that already with a hardware wallet?

[HashThis]

The large tech companies are monopolies. This includes PayPal, eBay, Stripe, Facebook, etc. Sad that they block crypto.

[andylynch]

I would disagree, especially for PayPal and Stripe. They are large players but the payments industry is very diverse and there are no shortage of providers. If you want do want to talk about dominant payment processors, I would look first at SWIFT, Visa, Unionpay, and MasterCard.