It was only a matter of time. Payment processor Square announced a partnership with Coinbase last night that will allow its merchants on Square Market to accept payments in bitcoins. If this announcement had come a year ago, we might have suspected it was an April Fool’s Day joke, but so quickly does the payments world move that now accepting bitcoins is far from shocking. Stripe also recently announced that it is beta-testing bitcoin acceptance for its merchants. (Perhaps the more important if less buzzy news in Stripe’s recent announcement was that it is also testing Automated Clearing House or ACH transactions.) Several payments startups are also working bitcoin acceptance into their systems. Square describes the buying process on its site in this way: Let’s dive into the technical details of checking out. When a buyer opts to “Pay with Bitcoin” we first generate a new Bitcoin address and attach it to the order. We will continually monitor this address throughout the checkout process so we know when it has received payment. Next, the buyer submits their payment. Buyers with a mobile Bitcoin wallet, simply open their wallet and scan the QR code to load the transaction details. Those with a hosted Bitcoin wallet [...]
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