BitPay CEO addresses objections to new Payment Protocol

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Nigel Frith
Nigel Frith
Former Global General Manager
Nigel was the Global General Manager at FXcompared. Nigel has a background in marketing for businesses and consumers as well working in a variety of online financial services roles. Read more
  • Stephen Pair responds to disapproval of introducing BIP70
  • Objective of reducing miner fees and solving service issues

BitPay CEO and co-founder Stephen Pair has responded to criticisms of his cryptocurrency cross-border payments firm’s decision to implement the BIP70 Payment Protocol by clarifying the reasons for the move. He stated that the company was endeavouring to provide a faster, incomparably more accurate service for customers wishing to make money transfers.

Pair acknowledges that some of BitPay’s users have been inconvenienced by the need to switch to an available compatible wallet to make payments. But the company had decided it needed to drastically curtail or eliminate payment errors to BitPay services as a matter of urgency, Pair explains in his company blog.

These errors arise whenever a customer ends up paying too much, too little or too late, with delays occurring because their payment hadn’t included an adequate miner fee, in which case payment confirmation is held up.

He writes: “These are not isolated incidents. Before Payment Protocol, wallets or exchange accounts not suitable for spending (along with user error) created more than a thousand of these errors for BitPay purchasers every week.”

Each of these problems, including the unwelcome impact of soaring miner fees, have been solved by the new Payment Protocol, Pair explains. It immediately locks in precisely the correct amount and an accurate Bitcoin address for payments to BitPay. Because this is automated, none of the manual processing errors that arose previously will occur.

Pair continues: “With Payment Protocol, a wallet can coordinate a payment directly with BitPay’s servers before it is broadcast on the Bitcoin network. If there is anything wrong with the transaction, BitPay can reject it. The transaction would never get broadcast, and the user would not lose money to a mistaken payment.”

Conceding that BitPay wanted to eliminate these issues in a fashion that was simpler than BIP70, Pair adds that the company chose to take immediate action as a result of skyrocketing miner fees. The Protocol, he emphasises, is now implemented by multiple major wallets and is already solving the problems it was designed to eradicate.


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