Well, I just tried to transfer one of my domains to Namecheap using Bitcoin, but their implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
I filled in my domain, got to the checkout page, and it gave me three options: Pay from 'Funds', 'Credit Card', or 'Paypal'. Turns out in order to pay with Bitcoin, you have to first add 'Funds' to your account. So I click the link to do that, it asks me how much I want to add (I don't know, aren't you supposed to tell me how much I owe?). Anyway, I follow a few pages and finally end up on BitPay's page where it asks me to send a specific number of Bitcoins to their address, so I do. The page recognizes immediately when I have sent the funds, and redirects me back to Namecheap.
Great, now I can find my way back to the checkout page and finally finish the transfer! Except I can't. Despite having sent the funds, they won't show up in my account for another hour (or possibly up to 24 hours). I understand they want to prevent double spend attacks, but this is absurd. We're talking about a $10 domain that they can just revoke if the payment doesn't clear. They have to wait 45+ days for paypal/credit cards to clear, but they give the product to me immediately, and I don't have to go through their ridiculous fund adding process to do so.
I applaud the effort Namecheap and I'm happy to see Bitcoin becoming more useful, but this needs work.
NameCheap actually doesn't have the capacity to revoke domains as they're an eNom reseller. Enom's policy is that once you buy a domain, it's yours. With domains sales being such a low margin business I can understand their level of caution.
I had no idea they were a reseller. It's all the more interesting when you look at eNom's reseller pricing page http://www.enom.com/resellers/benefits-pricingplans.aspx. I hope NameCheap is getting better bulk rates than what is listed.
That's interesting, I didn't realize that. But don't they still have to deal with PayPal/credit card charge backs? Do they think those will be more rare that Bitcoin double spends?
Many people (like myself) keep a fair sized balance on namecheap to make checkouts faster for credit cards in general, so this won't be a problem for everybody.
"They have to wait 45+ days for paypal/credit cards to clear"
This is not a thing. There's no concept of 'clearing' when it comes to credit cards; they are authorized for a specific dollar amount or they aren't. If a merchant authorizes $10 for a domain name, it's guaranteed that those funds are theirs (and they're given an authorization code confirming it). They more than likely get the funds in their bank account the very next business day.
The only way the money can be taken back from the merchant is if the consumer does a chargeback with their bank, so the only concern there is fraud.
Maybe 'clear' was the wrong term, but I was referring to chargebacks. Their only concern with Bitcoin is also fraud, since that's what double spends are too.
Also, I happen to be a previous Namecheap customer with a credit card attached to my account. If the Bitcoin payment had failed, they could have just charged my account/credit card to avoid their loss (possibly with some extra legal annoyances, but I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with that).
It sounds like that was something with the API for BitPay, perhaps NameCheap will skip the wait in the future and revoke if necessary but the thing that worries me is that maybe the BitPay API doesn't support notifying on pending funds instead of secured funds.
I looked at the BitPay API page (https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-payment-gateway-api) and couldn't tell for sure one way or the other. If it really doesn't, they may want to switch to Coinbase (a YC company that offers a similar service) which I know sends notifications immediately (and status updates as confirmations come in).
However, even with that fixed, it's still an issue that Bitcoin was not an option on the checkout page. I had to navigate somewhere else, then go through the checkout process again just to get back to where I was. I shouldn't have to stop what I'm doing and go through a completely different flow to pay for something.
I'm loving this Bitcoin ramp up over the past few weeks. Namecheap should be applauded for their general endorsement of "what's good for the internet". Of course it's in their best interest, but you don't see GoDaddy doing the same.
I think back to the "So, that's the end of Bitcoin"[1] article by Forbes and chuckle to myself. Hopefully one day we can look back at that article in the same way we look back at Ballmer laughing at the iPhone [2]
As far as I remember, they gave a discount to people moving from godaddy and even provided a tool to assist them move. Of course it was in their best interest.
Today's bitcoin is a little more liquid than yesterday's, and the trend will continue as long as more and more people start accepting bitcoin as payment. This liquidity has a positive effect on value.
> Meaning that once it hits a certain level people will start cashing in and crash the price again?
Only if they all sell at the same time. I don't see why that would happen. Selling ones bitcoins isn't an event you coordinate with other holders of bitcoins. It will happen gradually, and have a dampening effect on the price. In all likelihood it's happening right now. There was a huge ask wall at $40. Seems like a lot of people wanted to take profit at that price.
This is also why a crash doesn't happen. If everyone decided right now they've made enough money and wanted to sell their coins, the price would start dropping, until it reaches a point where people are no longer satisfied with the price, and they will stop selling. At which point some buyers will be satisfied with the price drop, and get into bitcoin again, thus raising the price, and the cycle continues.
It's really fascinating to watch the sum total of the actions of all the sellers and buyers, and how it unfolds as an ever-changing price and order book.
Neat, but will they turn a blind eye to domains registered with false information? After all, the biggest advantage of Bitcoin over traditional digital payment methods is its capability to be used anonymously.
> Neat, but will they turn a blind eye to domains registered with false information?
I imagine in the future internet, domain registrations will be just as anonymous (like .onion on tor) as bitcoin, no reason domain names can't be decentralized (different tld's of course).
i would love a method to be able to anonymously host websites that is un-take-down-able and untracable. It would mean that contriversial stuff can be put there without fear of repercussion, and thus, more democratic.
It's cheap to register a domain. Fake WHOIS information may mean that you have a possibility of losing the domain, but if you're doing something sketchy, or just politically unpopular to people who matter, there isn't a paper trail.
Really, a debit card card purchased with cash would probably work just as well, but there are imaginable situations where the risk of losing the domain is less of a problem than being identified as the registrant.
I keep valid contact information in the WHOIS records for my domains, and all I get out of it is e-mail spam from my registrar, e-mail spam from everyone else, snail mail spam from my registrar, snail mail spam from competing registrars (Domain Registry of America, anyone?), "SELL YOUR DOMAIN TO US!" robocall spam, and yearly ICANN WDRP e-mails from my registrar.
You need an anonymized WHOIS service. Namecheap offers free anonymized WHOIS by default on their domains ... its called "WhoisGuard Protection". Its a must have these days.
• who you have to "provide […] truthful, complete, current, accurate and reliable contact details" to,
• who "has the right to disclose your identity and your other Personal Information" and
• who "may resolve any and all third party claims, whether threatened or made, arising out of your registration or use of the Domain"
Now for a lot of people who just don't want their name easily visible, that's fine because it's unlikely these terms will be acted on. But for anyone who actually needs anonymity, to protect their right to free speech (for example), that's not good enough.
If you're looking to actually protect your anonymity when registering a domain, you ought to do so with your own privacy protecting corporation. Delaware corporations (any many offshore corporations) can be legally registered anonymously, which will keep your information off the whois information, without relying on a shaky 3rd party agreement.
I'm honestly not sure, but I was under the impression that bitcoin wasn't really anonymous. All transactions are publicly logged to prevent double spend, so you can trace a coin from the first time it was used. If you happen to know that an address maps to a specific someone, you can begin to create a pretty identifiable picture.
The biggest advantage of Bitcoin is being able to transfer funds globally without an intermidiary. Think of it as a payment method rather than a currency for the time being and you'll be better served.
The price of Bitcoin is currently hovering around 37 USD. I remember when Bitcoin was $2.00 after the first crash, I never expected it to rebound so quickly. Announcements such as Namecheap's lend credence to the current price, but I would not be surprised if a correction brought Bitcoin below $30.
Regardless, I am excited that there are more places to spend Bitcoin each and every day.
A domain registrar is going to have a fairly technically literate customer base, but bitcoin is edging towards the mainstream faster than I'd expected.
edit:
I just tried it. The workflow works well, but this brings me back to my biggest reservation about the usability of BitCoin for regular transactions: The long period (hours) to confirm a transaction.
To confirm the Bitcoin transaction at all. That's just how Bitcoin works - you have to wait for X new blocks to get confirmations from other peers. How long you wait determines your risk level.
It doesn't require hours at the protocol level, it's just a social standard. Typically, the first confirmation would occur in ~10 minutes. At the moment, the convention is 6 blocks / 1 hour is sufficient to prevent double-spending, but any merchant could have its own standard.
Also, for something revocable like a domain name, there's nothing preventing Namecheap from giving you the domain name immediately, and then revoking your access to it later if the transaction ultimately fails.
> Also, for something revocable like a domain name, there's nothing preventing Namecheap from giving you the domain name immediately, and then revoking your access to it later if the transaction ultimately fails.
Not according to shiftpgdn:
> NameCheap actually doesn't have the capacity to revoke domains as they're an eNom reseller. Enom's policy is that once you buy a domain, it's yours. With domains sales being such a low margin business I can understand their level of caution.
> regular domains take 24 hours to be useful anyways
It only takes about 10 minutes for a new registration to go live with most registrars. If you set your DNS servers during the purchase and have the zones ready from the get-go, your domain is resolving on the web immediately.
that's accurate. we pride ourselves in getting most of our domains online and functional in about 30 seconds -- as long as you don't visit the domain within those first 30 seconds and get your ISP to cache the "does not exist" record.
Also, as Bitcoin matures, you'll see businesses pop up that will insure against the risk for a small portion of the transaction allowing near instant confirmation for merchants.
I love that over time people start coming up with solutions to the same damn problems that other payment schemes have already come up with, and that last week they were saying were evil because someone else was doing it.
It's not unique to bitcoin, you see it in all sorts of places, it is funny though.
The difference is competition. Nothing fancy, nothing new and shiny. Just something that has been proven to work time and time again in lowering prices.
The barrier to entry in the payment card industry is simply too high to allow much competition. Entering the business of bitcoin payment processing has an extremely low barrier to entry; all the hard stuff has been done already!
Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency, not a payment scheme. You can use it like cash with no (or minimal) fees, or you can layer schemes with various properties on top of it.
But when people then layer payment schemes and payment-scheme type-assurances, services and (of course) fees on top of it, is it wrong to make this comparison?
Because at the moment you see a lot of people touting the 'no fees' part as the reason it wins over credit/debit cards, but when the weaknesses of that are pointed out someone like yourself inevitably pops up to tell us that of course it's not meant for that, but payment systems can be layered over the top, with a fee structure. Or it's silly to expect that because it's just like cash, when the expectation is in response to a BTC advocates claim that it's the best thing evar for the problem domain.
Basically it can't be both ways and I am kinda tired of the constant claims that it is.
I seems the overall useage and popularity of bitcoins has gone down though. I haven't had a single purchase with bitcoins in about a year at Flow and Zone Games ( http://flowandzonegames.com ) and that's quite a change from the one-a-week clip before.
I don't understand the currency so maybe I'm overpricing.
I think in five years, the idea of using credit or debit cards for electronic transactions will seem slightly ridiculous, sort of the way using snail mail to pay bills by check seems now.
Not every online transaction requires a chargeback. Perhaps donating to your favourite artist, author, charity would be easier in Bitcoin. And would mean you don't have to keep careful track of your spending to avoid huge interest rates from the card company.
Paying bills over the internet was easier and simpler than paying by check. Paying by credit and debit cards are easier, safer and simpler than using say Bitcoin.
There is zero chance that those cards are going anywhere. If anything the popularity of PayWave and other NFC technologies should see their use increase.
Except its now legal for merchants to tack on a surcharge for you paying with credit (as it should be).
Online merchants will absorb the cost of processing credit cards, as they aren't going to wait for a check in the mail. But physical merchants that can accept cash and are now allowed to recoup that 3%? I can see certain groups of people migrating away from plastic if it increases the cost of their goods/services in a meaningful way.
Adjusting for a 1% cash back that's only 2% surcharge for the ability to dispute charges, pay at the end of the month. VS: Risking a Bitcoin wallet will zero recourse if something goes wrong and an unstable currency.
The way I see it Bitcoins are not stable / safe enough for large transactions and the transaction fees on small transactions are effectively meaningless.
Almost sounds like you're confusing escrow with insurance?
Your refund would come from the middle guy entrusted to securing your funds until your goods were delivered as promised. If your goods are not delivered, or if what you ordered was nothing like what was promised, the escrow service would simply send your bitcoins back to you, instead of sending them to the merchant who tried to defraud you.
These services would likely charge a transaction fee for the service.
Even silk road offers an escrow service that is apparently effective enough. The scammers on silk road typically try to con you into closing the transaction before delivery of any goods, so one red flag that you may be looking at a scammer is a number of early settled transactions in their history.
If someone wanted to do something like this more mainstream, they could develop a third party bitcoin escrow service that offered an order history, rating or feedback system, and transaction comments from both parties. You could even develop a rating score formula similar to a credit score, where older accounts with more history, have higher scores, which make it much harder for scammers to use throw away accounts.
A lot of places that accept Bitcoins use BitPay and get paid in US dollars. BitPay charge a 3% fee for this service. (You can accept Bitcoins and exchange them yourself but then you take on the exchange-rate risk, which is quite substantial given how much the Bitcoin exchange rate varies.)
They must've changed it at some point and I only found outdated information, sorry. As wmf points out the total fees are actually 2.69% once you take into account the 0.99% fee for the payment gateway part.
BitPay charges a fee to accept BTC and another fee to convert to USD; these add up to 2.69%. If the customer pays Coinbase 1% to convert USD to BTC then total fees are nearly 4%.
> if it increases the cost of their goods/services in a meaningful way.
You do realise that credit cards aren't some new invention ?
The merchant costs have been factored into people's purchases for decades and there is no evidence it has caused any impact on sales. If anything the huge array of reward programs and partnerships e.g. with airlines has reinvigorated the huge of credit cards.
I just don't see anyone migrating away from credit/debit cards apart from fringe elements of society. Seems like proponents of Bitcoin live in their own world sometimes and treat the existing financial system as some competitor.
It's a great step towards domain anonymity, but at the end of the day Namecheap is a company in the USA that needs to comply with USA law and its enforcers. And we know it's not the most privacy-friendly country in the world.
To be fair, registering a .com domain is a bad idea if you want to stay anonymous. Go for a .is, a .ch or even a .eu.
Interesting if anyone had conducted an experiment, whether new Bitcoin button, near old good CC payment, actually worsens whole conversion rate, due to interesting Bitcoin reputation in masses.
This is beautiful to watch unfold: The universe is taking flight! Do help it, not for the sake of a cryptocurrency, but for the ethical implications. For you and for me.
Galt he isn't - "The universe believes in Encryption" (J.Assange) and this fact is at the same time the redeeming and redemption of the system we're watching suffer. Key point though - we're not relying on Nietzchieans supermen championing themselves or their genius. We're championing the universe, and empowering everyone. Freedom.
Hey all! I'm trying to build a domain registrar we'd actually love to use. Does bitcoin really appeal to you as a user? I'm trying to find a list of must-haves and want-to-have features to bake into my project.
Honestly, a good reputation is the primary feature I care about. Don't be super expensive, on par with Namecheap and godaddy. And don't make the interface bloody complicated. GD is the worst, Namecheap is better but needs work. And make it incredibly easy to move my domains in and out.
I have a lot of domains. Its expensive to maintain them. Godaddy will sometimes throw up brick walls and prevent domains from being transferred. Right now I've got something like 30 domains spread across 2-3 registrars. Its been such a hassle with godaddy that I kind of got stuck there, as much as I'd like to move.
I have a free subdomain from afraid.org. They've given me a URL with a secret key. When that URL is requested afraid updates my records to point my subdomain at the IP the request came from. I don't have a static IP at my apartment, but I have a script that calls that URL whenever my IP changes, allowing me to always have a domain name pointed toward my home server.
I am not familiar with operating a DNS server. Would that accomplish the usecase I described above? I would like to set up the same system but with a domain I own and not the free one from afraid.org
There are other DNS providers that will do what you want with a purchased domain... you can also use afraid.org for that matter... I put up a domain I wanted others to be able to use for dyndns on afraid.org ...
I remember seeing something about using my own domain on afraid.org. However I use google apps, and I wasn't sure if it was possible or what it would take to keep my email hosted there while still using the dynamic dns. Honestly I don'y have much experience in this area and I don't really know what to research to learn more.
I'd like bitcoin to succeed even to a small extent if only as a counterweight to keep central banks in check but it would be better if it weren't so cumbersome to use, ie slow.
It usually takes several days for funds to transfer between banks. Payment processors are a layer built on top of USD. The same infrastructure can be built on top of bitcoin.
The payment gateway BitPay calculates how many bitcoins equal a USD price and then give that amount (minus their fee) in USD to Namecheap within 2 days.
"It does not matter how many bitcoins we collect, how long it takes to collect them, what we can sell them for, or how long it takes to sell them."
If the seller and the payment provider quickly convert their bitcoins into USD -- as seems likely to be the case based on the link in Maxious's reply -- then they're minimizing the time interval during which their wealth is exposed to exchange rate fluctuations.
Well every currency is volatile isn't it? I guess (if namecheap is a us-based company) they're bitcoin price would fluctuate just as the bitcoin does in relation to the usd.
My take away is "holy crap, 10 million bitcoin a day is trading hands. That's a lot!"
Especially for a fledgling currency with staunch opposition by traditional bankers and financial markets because it solves a lot of problems that make them a lot of money.
Well, just reading about bitcoin and saw this here. I am pretty fascinated by the fact that it take not much time for currency conversion across the world. Awesome. Hope, this will dominate the current methods, and frauds.
Let's say I think that in one year's time Bitcoin will be gone. And let's say I want to put my money where my mouth is and want to short Bitcoin. Presumably there's a lot of people who think that Bitcoin is going to appreciate and thus should be happy to give me a low-interest loan. And yet there is no way to get a Bitcoin-denominated loan. Does this mean that people don't really believe Bitcoin will be with us in one year's time?
Bitcoin is not exactly a mature currency. When a new merchant starts accepting Bitcoin payments it's still front page news. So I wouldn't read too much into the lack of lending infrastructure. Evaluating creditworthiness, and going after defaulters, is a lot more work than holding cash deposits or accepting cash in return for products, and those things are still big logistical challenges in Bitcoin land.
Sure, but I still have my doubts. Apparently merchants like Namecheap accepting Bitcoin don't name their price in Bitcoin, they name their price in USD. Again, if you believe in Bitcoin, shouldn't you name your price in Bitcoin?
With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, it's quite hard to do. They can't set a single price, so they would have to modify their existing site (where most people probably come to pay in USD anyway) to automatically fetch the current market price.
Not yet, but that will happen once bitcoins saturate the market of currencies. We're just in the beginning stages. Linux sucked when it was first released too.
If I were to give someone a Bitcoin loan, what interest rate should I charge? The massive uncertainty of that question is enough to discourage any such activity. I wouldn't make a Bitcoin loan with a one-week period.
That's exactly what I'm saying. If it's deflationary then it should be worth your while to give me a loan at 0% (assuming I am low default risk). The fact that we don't know where Bitcoin is going to be in one week means that we don't really believe it's deflationary.
Because bitcoins are illegal in my country, I'll keep my personal domains on namecheap but will certainly move my company domains out of there until I figure out if there's a chance I have problems with this.
I like bitcoins just like everyone, but there are laws you need to abide by and bitcoins are illegal in many countries.
I don't see your concern being very realistic. I very much doubt doing business with a foreign company that accepts Bitcoins is illegal in any country as long as you yourself are not involved in Bitcoin trade. I mean, obviously you can be as cautious as you want, but it seems unreasonable to assume that NameCheap is forcing any liability onto its customers.
The laws your links were about appear to address doing business in foreign currencies, with dollars being used in those particular cases. NameCheap already did business in dollars, so why do you think adding Bitcoins presents an additional problem? As long as they're not forcing you to use Bitcoins or dollars for payment, I have a hard time imagining any country getting its knickers in a twist.
Like I said, obviously you should do what you think is best for your business. I just don't think it's fair to imply that NameCheap are forcing liability on people without hard evidence.
> Do tell more! I was unaware of any country having officially stated Bitcoin as illegal
Bitcoin itself may not be illegal, but the encryption schemes may be illegal for private citizens to use in some countries, especially ones that don't want their citizens communicating in secret.
In Bitcoin protocol there are no encrypted messages. The only thing that may or may not be encrypted is your own private keys. But it does not concern legislation of encrypted communication because you don't communicate those keys to anyone.
The law I pasted to some other replies just states that the only currency that can be used for commerce within the country is the national one. Also defines that national currency is the one created and regulated by the central bank.
Yes, I researched this, and my wife is also an experienced lawyer and works in the judiciary system, prior her current job at family tribunal, she worked in commercial sections.
There are many laws here that forbids using any currency that's not the national one, from consumer's laws to financial laws.
1) By your interpretation, there's a law in Brazil that prohibits the use of any currency that is not Brazil's national currency.
2) Because Bitcoin is not Brazil's national currency, you are now worried because NameCheap is now using Bitcoin, and will drop your company accounts with them.
So my main question is: why weren't you worried when Namecheap started accepted US Dollars (i.e., since their founding)? After all USD are not Brazil's national currency. Does this law distinguish between USD and other currencies? This is not the case according to the case you cited.
Most importantly, the law you refer to above, and the case you cited, all seem to involve government payments. And you've cited no other specific laws, other than this one (LEI Nº 4.595, DE 31 DE DEZEMBRO DE 1964), which is basically the law governing the establishment of a national currency. So according to this law, you have to pay the Government of Brazil in Brazilian currency (reales) for taxes, government contracts, etc. This is entirely reasonable; the US Government has a similar law. In the US, at least, this law does not outlaw the use of other currencies. And since multinational corporations do business in USD in Brazil every day of the week, it seems to me extremely unlikely that this outlaws the use of foreign currencies in Brazil. You just can't pay Brazilian government taxes or for other government services in other currencies.
Even though I do have credentials to keep this discussion going forever, I'll refrain from further comments on this thread. You are not willing to understand what I'm saying so my comments are pointless.
As far as I can tell, you have yet to explain how what Namecheap does with other people could effect you, if you simply choose to not use bitcoin to pay them. You haven't given us anything to fail to understand...
Sorry dude, you have several people asking you what country your in and you give no answer. What you said (That Bitcoins are illegal in your country) is complete FUD until you provide some proof.
As far as I am concerned, until you tell us where your country is, it seems your trying to damage namecheap's and /or Bitcoin's reputation for no reason.
My country is in my contact information, I didn't answer because I went to sleep.
This is the law that complete forbids using any currency other than the national for internal commerce and disposes about how forex must work, which bitcoins do not comply.
Thanks for replying, I can't read the links however I have a question: Is buying a domain from namecheap considered internal commerce? Also many other items bought with Bitcoins would be external to your country.
Surely you can buy a wordpress account with USD without being arrested? What makes buying wordpress / namecheap with Bitcoin any different? Or maybe i'm misunderstanding something. (Honest I probably am missing something, this happens to me a lot :)
I hesitated adding those links here because of the very high amount of downvotes I'm getting, which means most of you don't like the message I'm passing, anyway, I think you are acting out of emotion, there you go:
Contains links to laws in the US that can be used against bitcoins:
You appear to be from Brazil, in which case you're flat out wrong. Bitcoins are not illegal in Brazil, or in any other country that I'm aware of. The government securities commission in Brazil recently suspended operations of a Brazil-based Bitcoin investment company ("Grupo de Investimento Bitcoin") that they said was an investment company operating without government approval, but that's a far cry from barring Bitcoin.
It's odd about technology. The more pervasive it becomes before it legislators are aware of it, the harder it is to crack down upon. I don't know what the legal challenges will be to the widespread use of BitCoin in commerce, but I'm sure there will be some.
I filled in my domain, got to the checkout page, and it gave me three options: Pay from 'Funds', 'Credit Card', or 'Paypal'. Turns out in order to pay with Bitcoin, you have to first add 'Funds' to your account. So I click the link to do that, it asks me how much I want to add (I don't know, aren't you supposed to tell me how much I owe?). Anyway, I follow a few pages and finally end up on BitPay's page where it asks me to send a specific number of Bitcoins to their address, so I do. The page recognizes immediately when I have sent the funds, and redirects me back to Namecheap.
Great, now I can find my way back to the checkout page and finally finish the transfer! Except I can't. Despite having sent the funds, they won't show up in my account for another hour (or possibly up to 24 hours). I understand they want to prevent double spend attacks, but this is absurd. We're talking about a $10 domain that they can just revoke if the payment doesn't clear. They have to wait 45+ days for paypal/credit cards to clear, but they give the product to me immediately, and I don't have to go through their ridiculous fund adding process to do so.
I applaud the effort Namecheap and I'm happy to see Bitcoin becoming more useful, but this needs work.