greensheep
New member
Recently, when renewing a domain that I own I noticed that my registrar now supports Bitcoins to pay for the transaction. So, I thought, hey, why not give it a try to promote crypto coins instead of sending fees to credit card companies. The experience was terrible.
The registrar showed me the bitcoin address to pay to and the amount. I opened my bitcoin desktop client (I already run a full node that I sync from time to time, so this was easy) and created a new transaction. Copy and pasting the address and amount was easy. What fee to choose? The default value for 'normal' speed resulted in a fee of ~0.5mBTC or 0.20$. This was more than 1% of the paid amount! I could have as well used a credit card, then. So, I decided to lower the value a bit to about 0.1$. And off to the network the transaction went.
Now it meant waiting until the transaction gets confirmed. So, waiting for miners to produce new blocks. When those came in I had to realize that my transaction would not be included in the committed blocks. Turns out there was a backlog of several thousand transactions waiting in the memory pool at that time, most of them probably with a higher fee/byte than mine. So, I went off to bed.
Next morning, I realized that I had been lucky and the transaction actually made it into a block. So, I logged in with my registrar to see if the domain renewal has been processed. To my surprise nothing of my renewal request was visible anymore at all. I contacted their support and they told me that the renewal was cancelled on their side because the payment with their partner bitpay was not done within 15min. The gave me a link to bitpay for contacting their support for refunding. Bitpay support however told me that the payment has made it through to my registrar and that the registrar would have to do the refund.
So, my bitcoins are now stuck somewhere between the two. I have meanwhile renewed my domains using a credit card payment. Payment was confirmed within seconds and renewal processed automatically.
Can't await for merchants to adapt DASH for payments.I hope DASH integration will be even smoother than credit cards (Did we think of refunds yet? Does current dash implement BIP 70? What about evolution?). Once dash evolution is here, intermediates like bitpay will be less needed. But merchants probably want still automatically convert transactions to fiat, so these continue to exist. Have we yet contacted bitpay to ask for supporting dash for an instant payment experience for their users and merchants?
The registrar showed me the bitcoin address to pay to and the amount. I opened my bitcoin desktop client (I already run a full node that I sync from time to time, so this was easy) and created a new transaction. Copy and pasting the address and amount was easy. What fee to choose? The default value for 'normal' speed resulted in a fee of ~0.5mBTC or 0.20$. This was more than 1% of the paid amount! I could have as well used a credit card, then. So, I decided to lower the value a bit to about 0.1$. And off to the network the transaction went.
Now it meant waiting until the transaction gets confirmed. So, waiting for miners to produce new blocks. When those came in I had to realize that my transaction would not be included in the committed blocks. Turns out there was a backlog of several thousand transactions waiting in the memory pool at that time, most of them probably with a higher fee/byte than mine. So, I went off to bed.
Next morning, I realized that I had been lucky and the transaction actually made it into a block. So, I logged in with my registrar to see if the domain renewal has been processed. To my surprise nothing of my renewal request was visible anymore at all. I contacted their support and they told me that the renewal was cancelled on their side because the payment with their partner bitpay was not done within 15min. The gave me a link to bitpay for contacting their support for refunding. Bitpay support however told me that the payment has made it through to my registrar and that the registrar would have to do the refund.
So, my bitcoins are now stuck somewhere between the two. I have meanwhile renewed my domains using a credit card payment. Payment was confirmed within seconds and renewal processed automatically.
Can't await for merchants to adapt DASH for payments.I hope DASH integration will be even smoother than credit cards (Did we think of refunds yet? Does current dash implement BIP 70? What about evolution?). Once dash evolution is here, intermediates like bitpay will be less needed. But merchants probably want still automatically convert transactions to fiat, so these continue to exist. Have we yet contacted bitpay to ask for supporting dash for an instant payment experience for their users and merchants?
