Why is BTC not an attractive payment option? Anypay execs answer

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Bitcoin service provider Anypay recently explored why BTC is not an attractive payment option for merchants and consumers. In a blog post, written by Anypay President Derrick Horton, recommended that merchants and consumers to not use BTC for payments.

CoinGeek reached out to the Anypay team to know more, prompting Horton and Anypay CEO and tech lead Steven Zeiler to post a video on YouTube that expands on—and provides clarity for—a few of the topics covered in Anypay’s blog post.

In the video, Horton and Zeiler discuss why Anypay discontinued BTC support at a point in time, why Anypay brought BTC support back, what they believe the future of the BTC network is, as well as their opinions on the Lightning network and much more. We recommend checking out the full video on Youtube, but in the meantime, here are a few excerpts from their conversation as well as the original CoinGeek questions that prompted Anypay to create a video response.

CoinGeek: Why did Anypay discontinue BTC support at one point in time?

Zeiler: “Oh, we had to. It wasn’t ideologically or that we were choosing to discontinue BTC on behalf of merchants. It was that we discovered, or someone discovered for us, a vulnerability, which was a flaw in our system—which we didn’t understand, because when we first added BTC support, this flaw didn’t exist, it came as an update to the BTC software.”

Horton: If i can provide some context, this was at a time when Hayden Otto of Coinspice was going around Australia and showing how he could use BTC to scam the merchants. He would buy a cup of coffee and do a replace-by-fee. The Point of sale would say, “This payment is good” but then he could reverse the fee and walk away with his coffee without having to pay anything.

Our app, Anypay, is popular in Thailand, and a copycat said, hey, can I do this too? Can I do this to a merchant using BTC and Anypay? And he could. So he politely sent us the video before publishing showing how the merchant can get scammed, so we discontinued support immediately so no one else could get scammed. But you (Zeiler) came up with a pretty quick fix which detected a replace by fee.

Zeiler: Basically replace by fee means that you can cancel a payment…So what we did was discontinue [BTC support] and I added a feature to detect replace-by-fee. 

CoinGeek: Why did Anypay bring BTC support back?

Horton: Because the wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth, that was it. There were customers who were like “what, you’re not supporting BTC!?” They don’t realize, truthfully, that when they go to spend that money, they are going to be severely disappointed…”

Zeiler: We brought BTC back because we thought in time it would become obvious, and we want people to have choice…we can tell them which is our preferred currency but if they want to use whatever prominent fork they want, that’s fine.

CoinGeek: If BTC is not a good vehicle to make payments with, what is it good for?

Zeiler: It’s a better onramp to Bitcoin than bank accounts, people want to buy BTC for whatever reason. We are involved also in BTC sale, we sell BTC in one of our subsidiary businesses, Anypay Vending, and people want to buy BTC. They don’t want to buy BCH, they don’t want to buy BSV, and it’s because they have different information. People who buy it over the counter are typically less informed than people who are earning Bitcoin and definitely less informed than people developing Bitcoin applications. People building Bitcoin applications also understand why Bitcoin SV is better than BTC, but all these people are buying BTC, and it’s much easier to transform BTC to BSV than it is to connect your Wells Fargo account.

CoinGeek: What do you think the future of BTC is?

Zeiler: There is none. There is no future of BTC. I mean, what’s the future of Litecoin? Whatever the answer is, that’s the answer to “what’s the future of BTC.” it probably will have some market value, and there might be some hashing power involved. But i don’t like it. I don’t think the future of BTC is Lightning network, it just doesn’t seem good, it doesn’t seem right, because people can’t use it.

It’s like, “What’s the future of dial-up internet?” There must be people all over the world who are using telephone lines to communicate information over the internet. The world is a big place, there’s all kinds of people, with different levels of sophistication. But I think the future of BTC is kind of like the future of dial up internet….

Horton: Is there anything else within the context of this conversation that you want to include for the edification of the listeners?

Zeiler: We continue with BTC because people like it, because it has brand recognition. We are just going to let the competition occur. One thing I want people to know is—is it possible to develop unique features with BTC? 

We added support for on-chain reviews with TrueReviews, we can’t do that with BTC. It’s just not possible, not only is it not possible, if it was possible it would not be economic, it wouldn’t make economic sense, it would be too expensive. Who wants to spend a dollar or more when they are leaving a review? People who are leaving a review want to earn money. As we continue on, we are developing more features that are going to be only on BSV and not BTC because of the economics.