My understanding is that a big, maybe the biggest, obstacle is taxes.
In countries like the USA and Germany, the way I understand tax law is: When you buy something with crypto, that counts as a sale of an asset. So you have to document what the fair value of the coffee you bought is at that point in time, subtract what you paid for the crypto you used and then pay taxes on the difference.
This makes it more or less impossible to use crypto for payments, right? Every coffee you buy would have to be documented and evaluated and be part of your tax declaration.
Blockchains are not practical for payments because they payments are not instantly finalized, so they can't be used for synchronous payments, which makes integrating them to a web site super hard.
It seems that the best solution for instant final debit payments is to have a network of payment channels (lightning network inside Bitcoin, but Ethereum has some similar projects as well).
Most of the talent is creating new cryptocurrencies/tokens which doesn't really help payments. The remaining talent working on payments is not that big (just a bunch of people really) split to 4 different implementations (in the lightning network case, but Ethereum's implementations also have competing projects) that are compatible but still take a lot of work just to rewrite the same thing in 4 languages.
Some of the improvements for scaling lightning network are clear, some are under research (I'm working on implementing min cost flow optimizer into one of the implementations to be able to send large payments on the lightning network, which is not possible right now, but I had to choose an implementation to work on first, as working on 4 implementations is too much).
I saw Solana and thought, okay so it is possible to build a scalable cryptocurrency, but then again, the culture of speculation and excessive amounts of volatility make cryptocurrency useless for payments.
The only promising cryptocurrency I have seen so far is the non pegged stablecoin RAI which is basically trying to emulate central banks via a smart contract that uses control theory to adjust a redemption rate which is effectively an interest rate that changes the unit of account rather than the quantity of money.
Anyway, what this means is that cryptocurrency currency is still trapped in its degenerate gambling culture and we are at least a decade away from seeing real innovation in the cryptocurrency space beyond the usual tulip mania.
Solana, Stellar and Algorand makes it usable and possible for scalable crypto payments with USDC. I just tried it, swapped it and it works well.
a stable coin gets its audit in US.
They just want to speculate on it; first buy, then sell. Nobody actually pays with cryptocurrency.
edit: ahh it’s in the actual article. Never mind.
Every time I type my credit card number into some web form I think "Damn, I hope the number will not end up in some shady hands causing me trouble".
I had my credit card disabled once because someone started using it to buy stuff with it around the world. What a freaking hassle. Telephone calls, letters, several days without a CC, had to change the number everywhere .. annoying.
Paying a lightning invoice does not bear such risks.
If that's your only gripe than that's probably the easier way than switching to an entirely separate financial system.
I built Bitcoin and Stellar payment systems for a client. In both cases, I generated an address for each customer and associated that address with the customer ID. By not reusing addresses, I never had the problem of not knowing who had paid and who had not. You cannot trust most people to provide a memo correctly.
Of course, I generated a QR code for each payment request, so mobile users had no trouble. However, desktop users had to copy paste, and some people have trouble with even basic computer tasks...
The biggest challenge was having people under-pay. Depending on the wallet a person used, the wallet might show them a fiat currency amount instead of a crypto amount. If I said to pay 100 XLM, they might put that into their wallet and see an incorrect (or inaccurate) conversion and adjust the number down (or up, but that rarely happened).
I gave a locked in quote price when the order was placed, and I would let that price stay fixed until the order was paid. That was better than updating the to-pay amount after the order was placed, since the user might have been busy going off to buy or transfer the exact amount. We noted that if the conversion rate fluctuated greatly, the user could simply cancel the order and re-place it to get the current rate.
Another problem was that people would pay directly from an exchange "wallet", and the exchange might take a fee out for the transfer. So that 100 we requested might arrive as 90. I did allow up to 3% under-pay, but in cases where the difference was greater I had to leave the order open as partially paid (and request the buyer pay the missing difference). Then we found that if that difference was small, some people couldn't transfer that small amount from their exchanges (there were often minimum transfer limits).
Then on the company side, we've got crypto that we had to decide whether to sit on or convert to fiat. Obviously if the crypto market is on a bull run, it's beneficial to keep the money in crypto. But it's really a gamble (obviously a losing gamble in the last 10 months). So normally we would convert the crypto back to fiat every couple of days.
The technical aspects of all this were not really difficult, and it was nice being in charge of refund decisions (unlike when taking credit cards or paypal where a bad actor can cause immediate and long term problems for the merchant).
Two questions
1) Bitcoin needs time to transfer. How did you approve the transaction? Instantly in hoping it will go through or had the costumer to wait?
2) The problem with new Stellar addresses is, that they need to be "funded". Your sending wallet has to recognize if this address is empty to run the right function (it's not a normal transaction). Most of the wallets can't do that. They wouldn't be able to transfer any funds. Have you had problems with that?
2 - I pre-funded each Stellar address before providing it to the buyer. Periodically later if orders never got completed I would sweep the old addresses. But it wasn't much as Stellar was only about $0.2 USD at the time.
Regarding this, to clear up a common misconception, regular debit/checking takes at least one day to clear (US ACH), usually 2-3 business days, while Bitcoin transactions are validated within 1-2 hours, regardless of standard regional business hours.
The number solution can be improved if you search in the database for "free" numbers. I set the maximum payment time to 12 minutes. In this case, you can offer 100 payments per 12 minutes. I should update the article with this information.
For blockchains with the balance model you actually use only one address. There are solutions for Stellar to provide an unique address but this is not implemented yet.
The memo tag/field is the way to go. But as I said, it isn't widely implemented.
I am proud to say I have used crypto to buy a physical souvenir, a steam game, and a yearly subscription to a service.
I would gladly do that more if they allow me.
They waited long enough for regulatory clarity on crypto (and still are waiting for other rules to go through) and they have already deployed their offerings today.
So there is no 'big problem' and those companies are choosing the cryptocurrencies that will survive regulations.
What should instead be done is:
1. Accept stablecoin tokens like USDC. People do not want to buy a pizza and one year later be told they could have bought a house with that same set of tokens.
2. Use smart contracts, cryptographic proofs and digital signature algorithms instead of trying to match up balances and spends in the ledger.
Example: Merchant has a product on their site with ID 1234. User purchases it for 5 USDC.
If this has infinite stock, like a Bandcamp MP3, VPN subscription, production-on-demand, the user can bypass the paywall and request access to the product by writing a signed message with their wallet proving their purchase.
If this has finite stock like a vintage clothing item or unique artwork, a smart contract can tally stock of ID 1234: decrement its quantity on each successful purchase, and increment the user’s balance of that item. Proof of payment is the same: user can just sign a message at any point proving they own X amount of the product.
> Please let me know what you think of it.
Literally not a single point of contact anywhere to be found anywhere on the site. I guess you mean here instead?
Also your login error message is just a db response :)
I'm going to look into the error need probably to catch it.
Did you update it?
