Comment · Sat, December 17, 2016
Circle Discontinues Bitcoin Support
Original post in this thread
MisterYouAreSoDumb · 14 points
So it looks like Circle just rage-quit Bitcoin today. They seem to be frustrated by the transaction limit issue the past year, and would prefer to move to their own proprietary blockchain currency called Spark. I think they are going to fail miserably, but we will see.
Circle removes ability to buy and sell Bitcoin as it doubles down on mobile payments
What this means is that anyone with a Circle account can no longer use it for the only real purpose it had. You can no longer buy/sell BTC, nor can you send the BTC already in your account to another wallet. This means that you cannot pay for orders via Circle anymore, which sucks. Unfortunately, the only real alternative with the same ease of use is Coinbase. So for now, we suggest using Coinbase to purchase your BTC. Then I would suggest using an intermediate wallet, like blockchain.info or Electrum, to actually pay for the orders. Coinbase has been a bit strict with closing people's accounts. So it is best to use an intermediate wallet for payments for the time being.
There are a couple other Bitcoin servi…
What they were answering
garmondbozia · 1 points
Have you thought about giving a discount to bitcoin users to insentivize their use? If you were to discount bitcoin equal to the cost of your credit card processing feesss, you could really expand the bitcoin space and as well, ensure your ability to receive payments in some form. I am sure you have thought of this, but I would like to hear why or why not you do not go this route....
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
I can't even convert BTC to USD reliably right now, and the only immediate ways cost 7-10% in commissions to do it. So we lose money with BTC, or we just have to hoard it. It costs us more in fees than credit cards or Echecks. So we just hold shitloads of BTC. It's okay for the time being, as the value is holding/increasing. However, it could change at a moments notice, and we lose tens of thousands of dollars. It's just not an ideal solution for payments, and incentivizing people to just have us hoard more BTC doesn't make sense.
We had Bitpay accounts that converted to USD every night for reasonable fees, and were using them for a little while. We were considering incentivizing Bitcoin soon because it was working well. However, we just got all our Bitpay accounts shut down a day or so ago. So that's out the door now. Now it's back to hoarding BTC, and sell little bits here and there on the available platforms, till those get shut down too. It would be one thing if we could just pay suppliers with BTC as well. However, we need USD to pay 99% of the businesses we deal with. So converting to fiat is a must. That's becoming harder and harder for larger volume businesses like us. Once you hit certain volume limits, shit hits the fan, and you start getting shut down. You can thank good old Uncle Sam for that.