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BitPay : EMERGENCY UPDAT: Bitcoin network conditions and a change to minimum invoice amounts
Received this email few hours before from BitPay .
Hi Riyad,
The Bitcoin network has been seeing record transaction volume in the last few weeks. This growth has also led to record network congestion and record-high bitcoin miner fees.
Miner fees are now more than $30 per transaction on average. To protect purchasers and to continue to offer service for Bitcoin payments, we are now requiring a new invoice minimum payment amount of $100 on all BitPay invoices.
Why BitPay is raising the invoice minimum to $100
Bitcoin miner fees are the costs to purchasers for sending Bitcoin transactions. BitPay also pays these costs as an operational cost for sweeping and processing payments received to BitPay invoices.
With current bitcoin network conditions, transactions sent without large miner fees are at high risk of significant payment delays or payment failures. This has meant that bitcoin payments under $100 are quickly becoming impractical for users to send and for BitPay to process.
Source: https://bitcoinfees.info/
We will continue to evaluate Bitcoin network conditions. If bitcoin miner fees continue to grow at this accelerated rate, we may increase invoice minimums again in the coming weeks. We will work to give you as much advance notice as possible.
What this means for you
If a customer attempts to submit an order smaller than $100 in USD value, the BitPay API will now return an error message to your system preventing invoice creation. No payment will be possible.
Below is the JSON-encoded error message which BitPay will return to your system if a customer attempts to create an invoice which is below our minimum:
{ error: 'Invoice price must be at least $100 USD' }
If the customer wishes to pay for an item less than $100, they will need to use an alternative payment method.
What's going to happen to smaller bitcoin payments?
We are observing Bitcoin network conditions constantly. If network capacity increases or miner fee levels go down, we will evaluate lowering our invoice minimum again.
We are also working quickly to add support for a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) payment option on all BitPay invoices. Bitcoin Cash is a modified fork of Bitcoin which will allow your customers to send payments with significantly lower bitcoin miner fees. Bitcoin Cash payments will allow us to re-enable payments as small as $1 or smaller.
Learn more about Bitcoin Cash payments
In the meantime, if you wish to test payments smaller than $100, please use BitPay's testnet environment and a testnet bitcoin wallet.
What can BitPay do about miner fee costs?
BitPay does not control or benefit from bitcoin miner fee levels. But we will continue to improve our platform to protect our users from the effects of large swings in these fees.
We will be working in the coming months to implement Segregated Witness (Segwit) in various parts of the BitPay platform. Segregated Witness reduces the size of bitcoin transactions, allowing for an average bitcoin miner fee reduction of over 40%.
Thank you for your patience as we respond to changing Bitcoin network conditions. Our team is working hard to give you access to fast, secure, reliable, and affordable blockchain payments. We look forward to releasing these improvements in the year ahead.
Best,
The BitPay Team
Lot of hosting providers are using Bitpay , so I guess this might be an problem .
Comments
But it's fake, so why should this matter?
Ah lovely... $30/$40 fees, more than a SWIFT payment.
Well, that not only happened to bitpay, a lot of exchange services like Changelly or anycoin changed minimum payout to 100EUR on all coins.
A few still allow 20EUR, but not much like https://shapeshift.io
I can't help but think if things continue along this path it may be a large contributing factor to a Bitcoin crash. I mean what value is there in a coin which has fees higher than Paypal.
Wrong imo.
This has happened before, it'll go down shortly.
The full blocks happen every time there's any real price changes in the market where every moves their coins to/from the exchanges. There's supposed spam attacks but that seems to just be a conspiracy theory for the time being.
The core guys need to address it though and the easiest is just a block size bump. Segwit is supposed to give a bit more room anyway, but the problem is that not even the official wallet has support for it and Coinbase is pushing it out. BTC can't deal with 6 more months of this.
If it wasn't for the fact we added other coins to our supported list the majority of our crypto customers would either leave or look to move back to paypal/CC/etc. Paying a $30 fee on a $3.50 service is lunacy, it's cheaper to use Western Union.
Francisco
Anything in the works?
Well, there's always the altcoins. Bitcoin Cash works well and if you're an early holder of bitcoin (pre august) then you have some BCH anyway. Fees are super cheap, transactions go through very fast.
Litecoin works well but i've seen fees going up over there (a dollar or more now I think?). Monero is also very popular and has very affordable fees too I think?
Francisco
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. But from an outsiders perspective Segwit, cash fork etc have done nothing to inspire any confidence for me that the network can resolve issues like this in the timeframes necessary.
A lot of the FUD surrounding the block size bump was that "the network can't support it! People can't afford the diskspace!!" and crap like that. The fork went ahead and has proven that it scales well and works as expected. I think for the Cash code base the big thing was just adding protections to the chain split, the block size part is literally a single define.
Francisco
I hate Bitcoin, it's a dead coin waiting to happen but it's not going to happen right now. I strongly believe in Ethereum as a replacement coin, network has been developed to handle the load of Bitcoin and keep fees low. So is BCH so it's going to be a fight over who becomes the primary currency when BTC eventually flops. All these retarded news outlets saying BTC is crashing when in reality they have no clue what they are talking about aren't helping either.
Well, isn't that a problem for Ethereum though? I thought it wasn't supposed to be a store of value, rather a way to power the smart contracts and other things?
Litecoin is pretty solid and has a very friendly community from what I've seen. I really like Monero's development cycle, that way you don't end up in the rut that Core's in.
Francisco
Everyone should look into using Ripple (XRP.) At a glance it appears to be the winner in every category (transaction settlement speed, transactions per second, and fees.) We're going to try to implement it as a payment method soon, as Bitcoin is becoming problematic.
Always seen potential in Ripple
I see a future in BCH and Dash for quick and fairly small invoice payments. Now payment gateways are setting minimums for bitcoin payments, it'll just be getting more and more unusable if you ask me.
Even worse.
A single game used ETH for it's micro-transactions & it brought the network to its knees.
Nothing that's major at the moment scales all that well.
RIP my bitcoin vps customers.
some of our clients already were opening tickets , requesting to extend there renewal date ,since bitcoin confirmation taking long .
They can still pay you on a 5 to 10 year basis.
what is other payment gateways which is accepting alt coins ?
Coingate / Coinify :-)
I decide to add support for more crypto due to the BTC saga. Only downside, all payment must be done manually for the moment.
BTC is becoming a nightmare recently...
Yeah ... i still have someone with around 5€ pending, so 5-10 years until he will get his order delivered?
pretty sure he meant a 5 year billing cycle
Bitcoin only, 10 year prepay...what could go wrong?
They backtracked already on this today.
Message from BitPay : We continue to monitor bitcoin network conditions, but we have re-enabled BitPay invoice payments for amounts of $5 or above.
Yep, Something is happened, that they changed their mind.
"something" haha
We sell cakes and only cakes, due to the high price of cakes right now we are only selling cakes in batches of 100 cakes ... oh I think we went bankrupt, oopsie!
You all seem to be under the impression they're doing this with some sort of malice.
The bitcoin network itself was enforcing the $30 transaction fees and only now getting any progress through their pending transaction pool. You're welcome to check the current 'unconfirmed transactions' count at https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
The number has come down, but it was nearly (or even over) 300,000 earlier in the week. The miners are obviously going to favor who's willing to pay more to approve their transaction.
Places like Coinbase have enough direct customers that they can sometimes do 'off chain settlements' but I still think they charge a decent sized fee for that. Bitpay doesn't have anything like that though, meaning settling to them requires it being on-chain.
This isn't the first time fees have been going mental like this, they've been consistently over $10 or even $20 for the past few months and is why we've had to go out of our way to accept altcoins as settlement. We can't even convert those coins at the moment just because we're still going to get slapped with the BTC network fee. At this point it'd be better for us to just settle out to an exchange and convert everything there.
Francisco