Stripe, the famous online payments processing company, has announced it will stop its support for Bitcoin payments by April 2018.
“Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.
Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)
This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies.”
This is notable in that Stripe became the first company to include Bitcoin payments, four years ago. Ironically, they have found that customers are not using
bitcoins as a payment option anymore; which significantly reduces Bitcoin revenue. So, the company decided to close support for Bitcoin payments.
However, the company will work with customers for the next three months to make a clean transition before finally stopping Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018. The company also promised to present a few new innovations and technologies with some new ideas to make cryptocurrency viable for bills in the future.