The co-founders of Stripe, brothers Patrick and John Collison, recently discussed the company’s decision to no longer support bitcoin payments, and expressed a willingness to reverse this decision in future.
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Declining Use of BTC as Means of Payment
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison shared their view of bitcoin and the cryptocurrency markets, and discussed Stripe’s decision to no longer facilitate BTC payments made earlier this year.
When asked whether the company’s decision to no longer conduct bitcoin payments through its platform would leave it “on the wrong side of history”, Patrick Collison responded, “We’re absolutely open to revisiting this.”
Patrick sought to emphasize that the reasons underpinning Stripe’s decision to move away from BTC are “a question for the bitcoin community, basically, and especially the architects of the software, whether they want to optimize bitcoin for being a payment method, or for being […] a form of digital gold, a store of value.”
“At the time we made our decision, it was trending towards being a digital store of value – I think that’s a valuable thing to have exist in the world, […] I genuinely wish them the very best with that […] It just works less well for our use case, and this wasn’t […] a decision where we wanted to be the arbiter, we were just looking at the data, and it was declining rapidly in use as a payment method, if it starts increasing [in use] again as a payment method, then sure, great, we’ll go back and we’ll add it,” Patrick said.
Stripe Founders Remain “Fascinated by Cryptocurrencies From a Technology Point of View”
John Collison echoed his brother’s sentiment, emphasizing that “the speed and cost” of conducting “transactions on the bitcoin network was the main” issue. “Our determination was that bitcoin is not a good payment method, which is a very different discussion than cryptocurrencies generally,” John said.
Regarding the current state of the cryptocurrency sphere broadly, John stated that he believes “there is a ton of promise that has not actually been shown in real-world applications yet, and while we are waiting for those real-world applications, I think people are getting a little distracted by some of the hype.”
“I see tons of companies, and tons of people, getting distracted by almost vanity projects of ‘we’ll put this database on the blockchain or things like this’ because people are not really weathered in the technical details,” John continued.
Do you think that BTC will see an increase or further decline in its adoption as a means of payment? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
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