OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor

ggurjeet about 2 hours ago 55 commentsRead Article on opennode.com

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Discussion (55 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Hasz•about 2 hours ago

Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.

For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken

jcfrei•43 minutes ago

lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.

Anon1096•about 1 hour ago

I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).

nohell•about 1 hour ago

Monero is even cheaper and more useful as cadh because it's private. Anyone can see Bitcoin history and where the user got their coins.

dfish•about 1 hour ago

They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle. It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.

nohell•about 1 hour ago

CIA uses Bitcoin for intelligence gathering: https://cryptobriefing.com/cia-bitcoin-intelligence-gatherin...

Really? Did we IT people decide giving up privacy for security is a good idea?

samantha-wiki•about 2 hours ago

Is it open source? If not, why choose the name “OpenNode”?

gosub100•16 minutes ago

Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering

iamsaitam•about 1 hour ago

Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)

a3w•about 1 hour ago

So, OpenAI is certainly never trademarked? /s

cwmma•about 1 hour ago

they just lost a case in Europe about being trademarked

askonomm•about 2 hours ago

Just like how OpenAI is open source.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

Open as in "The door is open come in and give us your money"

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

"Open as in wallet"

pelagicAustral•about 2 hours ago

OpenAI rings a bell

aantix•about 2 hours ago

Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases?

The buying power is all over the place.

dfish•about 1 hour ago

Someone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries. Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system. Or both.

mothballed•about 2 hours ago

This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.

stymaar•about 2 hours ago

This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…

dfish•about 1 hour ago

I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively. The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin. You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.

lesuorac•about 1 hour ago

Worst for whom?

Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?

greyface-•about 1 hour ago

Even if you're willing to operate fully in the "tradfi" system, your counterparty might not be, and you still want their business.

mothballed•about 1 hour ago

There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response

1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)

2) Irreversibility.

3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.

4) Lowered friction for international transaction

5) One or both sides can be unbanked.

jancsika•about 1 hour ago

> (potentially) lower transaction fees

Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP.

For Bitcoin it's not even close.

</transactionFeeDiscussion>

tenuousemphasis•about 1 hour ago

Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.

mikelovenotwar•about 2 hours ago

Broken link on the pricing page "How did we calculate this number " -> https://help.opennode.com/en/articles/3179796-where-are-open... -> "Uh oh. That page doesn’t exist. Try searching for your answer or just send us a message."

futurecat•about 1 hour ago

They've been in business for a long time and I used them when I experimented with QR code for street artists to receive tips. OpenNode is very simple to implement!

pixelatedindex•about 2 hours ago

I’m a little confused by the fees. In their pricing page (https://opennode.com/pricing) it says:

You request $100, the customer pays 0.00152 BTC, and then you get $99.

But 0.00152 BTC is almost $100? If I’m a business why would I pay $100 in BTC fees for a $100 transaction?

What is this solving? I’ll never understand crypto.

Edit: nvm I’m dumdum. Will get coffee. Thanks to everyone who replied.

tremarley•about 1 hour ago

$100 is the transaction value,it is not the cost of the transaction fees.

The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.

jonbwhite•about 2 hours ago

You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.

bastawhiz•about 2 hours ago

It sounds like the fee is about $1.00: the delta between $100 and $99.

dfish•about 2 hours ago

The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD

5701652400•about 1 hour ago

when we will finally have good self-hosted, open-source, BTC gateways?

seany•30 minutes ago

This would be more interesting with other coins. Monero or cash come to mind

jdw64•about 2 hours ago

American-style words are really hard these days. I thought 'open' meant source code is available, but at some point, starting with OpenAI, it seems like 'open' has come to mean 'we'll open your wallet.

repelsteeltje•about 1 hour ago

The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.

jrm4•about 1 hour ago

Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.

Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.

5701652400•about 1 hour ago

not your keys, not your money.

jrm4•about 1 hour ago

Interesting to see that this crypto thing might still have legs, as someone who's invested a lot of time (and thankfully, not a painful amount of money) into the idea.

Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.

And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

>Bitcoin - the only legitimate cryptocurrency secure enough for transacting at scale.

I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.

nohell•about 1 hour ago

Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging

charcircuit•36 minutes ago

DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.

dfish•about 1 hour ago

Stablecoins can be censored. You deposited into Huobi 5 years ago? Banned. Now we keep your stablecoins, thanks for playing.

You can't censor Bitcoin.

charcircuit•35 minutes ago

>You can't censor Bitcoin.

Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.

nohell•about 1 hour ago

As a Chinese person I can confirm. Monero is the way.

w4yai•about 2 hours ago

Glad to see such initiative on bitcoin !

octocop•about 2 hours ago

Looks solid

mothballed•about 2 hours ago

If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.

dfish•about 1 hour ago

It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.

The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.

nohell•about 1 hour ago

Why not just accept Monero? It acts more like cash. Do you really want to leak every transaction you've ever done, every time you buy something?

Bitcoin is surveillance capitalism dream!

Cider9986•about 1 hour ago

Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.

Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.