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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

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).
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.
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.
I don't have much substance to add to the discussion but this kind of topic is very relevant to the GNU project Taler which aims to bring an open payment infrastructure to general use/"the market". They have significant investment and institutional interest notably from the EU and established organisations such as NLNet. I am not affiliated but figure this deserves more attention, especially in this conversation.

https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

So, this is 'open' as in 'OpenAI', not as in 'open source'. What's the benefit of this compared to something like NOW Payments for merchants (or the myriad of alternatives)? NOW Payments supports a wide range of crypto currencies as well.
Is it open source? If not, why choose the name “OpenNode”?
Just like how OpenAI is open source.
Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering
"Open as in wallet"
Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)
OpenAI rings a bell
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.
And that isn't even the original meaning either! "open source" in reference to software was itself a term stolen from the intelligence community.

"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.

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.
Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.

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

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

The buying power is all over the place.

I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:

- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops

- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard

- People from countries with active sanctions against.

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.
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
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.
Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.
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.

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."
Why this instead of the opensource, well used, and trusted BTCPay that you can self-host and has 0% fees?
The complexity involved. Most people just want to get on with their work and not get lost into details of self hosting (plus maintaining) yet another service. probably they've self hosted sth else and they're spread thin on resources.

Their rates are not a big inconvenience, IMO

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!
>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.

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.

Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging
Working on an open-source Bitcoin-compatible testnet exploring post-quantum cryptography. Interested in distributed systems, applied cryptography, Bitcoin, networking, and open source.
This is a message for the person who flagged the submission: I wonder what’s the reason this was flagged? Genuinely curious.
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.

$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.

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.
This would be more interesting with other coins. Monero or cash come to mind
Paying kagi subscription with opennode. Works flawlessly and instant
Wow I can't believe this lightning crap is still going. No wonder crypto is still a joke, you clowns are still pushing Bitcoin like it's the be-all-end-all of crypto, and not the first ever reference implementation of blockchain. It's so obsolete at this point that it's not even funny anymore. It's sad. I wanted so badly for crypto to be a thing. But it never will because of these people. And I don't even want it anymore if it has to be bitcoin until we're all dead. All of the criticisms of crypto are 100% accurate when regarding Bitcoin. It destroys the environment and the parts economy simultaneously with it's ridiculous hardware requirements. Lightning doesn't make that go away. I remember 6 years ago there was already reams of new blockchains that made Bitcoin look like the cotton gin. And they will never be used for anything. Please switch to scalping pokemon cards from kids or something, it would be less despicable and damage the world less.
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.
People still use bitcoin?

I thought it was a vanity coin now

Does it support Monero?
Why was it flagged?
Glad to see such initiative on bitcoin !
not your keys, not your money.
when we will finally have good self-hosted, open-source, BTC gateways?
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!

Looks solid