pay in with bitcoin

[chadwhitacre]

Status: We need someone to join Team Gittip and take ownership of our bitcoin integration. Is it you?!

The essence of Gittip is recurring gifts, and there is (I gather) no way to do recurring bitcoin payments. Gittip will likely add explicit support for one-off (#5) and pre-paid (#113) gifts once the core recurring feature has matured. At that point we'll be ready for funding with bitcoin.

I (@whit537) am going to let someone else contribute the bulk of this work. On the pattern of Balanced contributing integration with their system (#78), my ideal would be to see a bitcoin processor such as Bit-Pay step forward and contribute integration with their service. A lesser option would be for a non-Bit-Pay member of the Gittip community to contribute the integration.

[alex]

Please don't do this, I know that I, and many others, don't take bitcoin very seriously, and projects that use it are similarly often not taken seriously.

[chadwhitacre]

Seems like ideally people would be free to deposit and withdraw in the currency of their choosing. So if someone wants to deposit bitcoin you could still withdraw USD transparently (you'd never know they paid in bitcoin).

That said, bitcoin isn't a top priority for me personally.

[thiloplanz]

+1 for developing the code to support bitcoin (in a branch), but agree that it should not be integrated right now

[thiloplanz]

Actually, just having the option to accept payments and withdraw money via Bitcoin (provided by a payment gateway) should be sufficient. No need to have deep Bitcoin integration throughout the system (i.e. account balances can still be exclusively in USD).

In addition to that, there could be an option to display your bitcoin receiving address on your profile page in gittip. That way, people can directly send bitcoin donations (peer-to-peer, outside of gittip).

[NakedMoleRatScientist]

Yes, please. I will only use this service if it support bitcoin.

[chadwhitacre]

Seems like there's strong opinion around this question. Here's a contra argument that goes into some detail:

http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea/answer/Adam-Cohen-2

[chadwhitacre]

Somewhat vigorous discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4200574

[olalonde]

Whether Bitcoin is "not serious"/"a scam"/"not a currency" is irrelevant. People who receive bitcoins are free to convert them to USD as soon as they receive them.

[colindean]

I support this and I'd happily devote a portion of my monthly mining to it developers via it.

[thiloplanz]

I think the only practical way to support Bitcoin is in the same way we support all other payments: Team up with a payment gateway that supports Bitcoin. The money would be transferred to Gittip as USD, and would show up as USD with the recipient of the donation. But thanks to the payment processor, deposits and withdrawals could be made as Bitcoins, or Pound Sterling or whatever. No need to bring in multi-currency support into the system itself.

So this comes down to finding a payment processor that likes bitcoin. This would probably need to be an additional payment processor, as it is unlikely to be one that can also handle "mainstream" credit-card transactions.

Also note that Bitcoin payments will have to be pre-paid payments (see #113), I don't think it is possible to set up a recurring charge.

[colindean]

bitpay is probably the most trusted bitcoin payment processor I know of. I've used it for several transactions. While it's not the most beautiful experience, it sure is quicker than some other checkout processes!

mtgox was working on one, but I've not heard any progress on it and it's definitely not up on their site yet.

[singpolyma]

+1 for BTC through a reliable payment processor. No reason gittip should have to handle any currency directly :)

[thiloplanz]

+10 USD for BTC through a reliable payment processor.

Just started a bounty for this on FreedomSponsors: http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/16/pre-pay-gittip-with-bitcoin

Anyone who also wants this, feel free to chip in.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 for www.bit-pay.com from @lyndsysimon at PyOhio.

+1 mt gox payment system plus they are an exchange so they would make it easy to convert, for bitcoin in general, the bitcoin community is worth ~$9 million, it is being seen more and more people everyday. Even highly respected VC's in silicon valley have invested in a company that is targeting paypal in the mobile/online currency area. I think bitcoin would be a great fit for gittip.