Add bitcoin support

[MartinDelille]

After today email discussion, I think it's time to think about bitcoin support. I have collected two ressources that might help me in the process:

• http://21.co/
• https://paymium.com/

I need to do some further investigation but the main issue will be how to deal with the situation where someone give bitcoin to another accept only euro. I think we agree not to partition money flow? What should be the referal value in the system?

Feel free give me your point of view!

[Changaco]

This is blocked on #182.

[Changaco]

Quote from Learning From A Year of Security Breaches:

Bitcoin is targeted, even if you store none.

Platform companies are often compromised with the assumption that they may have access to, or integrate with, a bitcoin company. Please refer to the Blockchain Graveyard for more information on this trend, or this public example from SendGrid’s blog.

[Nutomic]

It should be pretty simple to do this kind of integration with Coinbase Payment Buttons. Basically you just have to register a merchant account and embed the button. And you can configure it to do automatic, daily payouts to a bank account.

[ollieparanoid]

I am afraid to use my card online (especially on liberapay.com I have never heard about), any option for paypal or bitcoin?

I've gotten similar e-mails (with bitcoin, monero, not paypal) and would appreciate this feature very much 🎉

Thanks for making this awesome platform in the first place, and I understand that the feature is blocked right now.

[ericfont]

Sorry if I'm pointing out the obvious, but I feel compelled to note that bitcoin itself does not have a mechanism for recurring payments (in other words an owner of a wallet can only "push" payments, but a receiver can't "pull" payments), which clearly is essential for any patronage-based donation service.

It seems Coinbase has implemented "pull" payments, so I'd second what Nutomic says.

(I do understand that this issue is blocked on #182, but I'm really hoping to integrate bitcoin, because that would be a game-changer).

[pm73]

I would like to say that I actually prefer to have option of making "push" payment.
I see you allow wire transfer according to FAQ, so it is already supported.

Please note that Coinbase can arbitrary suspend an account.
If you go with them anyway, please make sure user can make one-time payment without Coinbase account and giving them his/her data.

CoinPayments allows sender to choose one of many cryptocurrencies, which is quite useful considering how expensive Bitcoin transaction can be. I'm not affiliated with them, I just paid them for something and it worked.

[bjorn]

bitcoin itself does not have a mechanism for recurring payments (in other words an owner of a wallet can only "push" payments, but a receiver can't "pull" payments), which clearly is essential for any patronage-based donation service.

I don't get this statement, and would also prefer to "top up" manually rather than having a service pull money out of my pocket on its own account. It's not like I'm paying for a service here, I'm just donating. So if the balance runs out, then the donation won't go through. No legal action is required since I wasn't obliged to keep donating. A "low balance" warning would be nice of course.

[ericfont]

You're right, it's not a problem for topping up.

[maurokenny]

@bjorn you are right. Maybe just a message to remember to send more money to liberapay would be enough.

@pm73 CoinPayments seems to be cheaper.

Another option is https://www.bitwage.com/

How does it work today? I mean, when someone sends money, does it go to a liberapay's bank account and then every month you send some amount to the content creator using mangopay? Or does it go to mangopay's account and then they send every month?

[maurokenny]

@MartinDelille I think that CoinPayments and https://www.bitwage.com/ do the job