{"id":21124,"date":"2018-10-23T19:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T19:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe63a0052697"},"modified":"2018-10-23T19:00:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T19:00:22","slug":"year-after-launch-btcpay-has-grown-larger-its-creator-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/technical\/year-after-launch-btcpay-has-grown-larger-its-creator-expected","title":{"rendered":"A Year After Launch, BTCPay Has Grown Larger Than Its Creator Expected"},"content":{"rendered":"
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First hinting<\/a> at his project in a reply to a BitPay tweet<\/a> on August 2017, Nicolas Dorier boldly claimed that BTCPay would make one of crypto\u2019s most popular payment processors obsolete. <\/p>\n

In an r\/Bitcoin post<\/a> two months later, he clarified that his brainchild isn\u2019t meant to \u201ctake the place of BitPay.\u201d Rather, BTCPay is poised as a new and improved alternative, a decentralized stand-in for merchants who wanted an easier way to accept bitcoin. <\/p>\n

A year later, the project has grown larger than Dorier anticipated. With a community of open-source developers at its back and growing demand from a faithful user base, the payment processor has expanded its support past bitcoin and has integrated with many of the web\u2019s most popular point-of-sale (PoS) plug-ins. <\/p>\n

It has become a meteoric success. But for what started out as a hobbyist\u2019s side project, this success has, in some respects, become unwieldy.<\/p>\n

A Fork in Response to a Fork <\/h2>\n

Dorier launched BTCPay at a time when a contentious proposed Bitcoin hard fork was sending tremors through the community. BitPay\u2019s approach to this hotly contested fork, Dorier told Bitcoin Magazine<\/em>, was part of the reasoning behind BTCPay\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n

\u201cBTCPay was created when BitPay was trying to force all their merchants to use another altcoin instead of Bitcoin. The priority for BTCPay was to make sure that all software written to work on BitPay will work on BTCPay with minimal (or no) change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201caltcoin\u201d Dorier refers to is B2X, the unsubstantiated product of the failed Segwit2x hard fork<\/a>. A controversial proposal<\/a> at the time, the protocol change intended to double Bitcoin\u2019s block weight limit. While proponents saw this as a necessary scaling solution, opponents argued it would open up security vulnerabilities, and many of these same opponents distrusted the invite-only, conspiratorial meeting that gave birth to the planned fork.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, the fork never really made it off the ground<\/a>. Still, a number of Bitcoin-related companies around the world supported it, and BitPay was part of a not-inconsequential list of companies that said they would treat Segwit2x as Bitcoin, given enough community consensus.<\/p>\n

Dorier was not a fan. A part of the NO2X movement himself, the developer decided to create BTCPay in the face of what he viewed as an uneven, centralized decision in BitPay\u2019s commitment to B2X. <\/p>\n

His alternative in BTCPay is meant to offer the convenience of BitPay\u2019s payment processor API without the counterparty risk or centralized custody inherent in its parent technology. To create this alternative, Dorier simply forked BitPay\u2019s open source code.<\/p>\n

\u201cRedeveloping all of it would have consumed lot’s of my time. By using the same API shape as BitPay, I can basically fork their open source work and easily make it work on BTCPay.\u201d<\/p>\n

With BTCPay, users never relinquish control over their private keys, and they can even host their own node to buttress the platform\u2019s services. As Dorier put it, this opens up the potential for \u201cnew things becoming easily possible,\u201d such as integrating the Lightning Network or atomic swaps.<\/p>\n

With a New Platform, New Services (and Coins)<\/h2>\n

For those who are less technologically savvy, BTCPay won\u2019t leave them behind.<\/p>\n

Node hosting on Microsoft’s Azure<\/a> provides 1-click deployment for the average merchant, who can pay a third party to host a BTCPay node on their behalf. Dorier stated that this node hosting service is the most popular and oldest available, though a rising competitor is cutting into its dominance. Luna Node<\/a> is gaining traction among BTCPay\u2019s merchants, mainly because it is cheaper to host on the service ($10\/month as opposed to $60\/month for Azure). On top of this cost reduction, it also accepts bitcoin as a form of payment and has a more intuitive setup wizard, Dorier claims.<\/p>\n

On the topic of merchants, BTCPay\u2019s most integrated plugins are Drupal, WooCommerce, Magento and PrestaShop. Dorier told us that Shopify \u201cis the most asked [for],\u201d though he said that it\u2019s difficult to \u201cget a foot in the door\u201d with them unless you\u2019re a big company.<\/p>\n

For those merchants that leverage BTCPay, they have access to more payment options than the platform\u2019s counterpart in BitPay. Though BTCPay is \u201cmainly focused on Bitcoin,\u201d as Dorier put it, community developers have also added support for litecoin, dash, dogecoin, monacoin, bitcoin gold, feathercoin, groestlcoin, viacoin and polis. Dorier believes that there is enough interest for stratis, monero and ether to see their own support as well, though he emphasized that \u201cthe burden of integration is in the hands of the altcoin communities,\u201d as he himself will not go out of his way to add them.<\/p>\n

With Growth, Growing Pains and Limitations<\/h2>\n

Even with its fast-growing success, BTCPay has its tradeoffs and limitations.<\/p>\n

One of these is lack of a fiat on-ramp. One benefit of BitPay\u2019s centralization and custodial services is that it can support seamless crypto-to-fiat conversions. For a decentralized BTCPay, this feature has been markedly absent from its platform.<\/p>\n

Still, Dorier is working to bring this liquidity to the platform, though he did say the solutions were still too underdeveloped to discuss seriously.<\/p>\n

One of these solutions is an exchange integration that would allow merchants to forward transactions and autosell them on fiat-ramp exchanges. \u201cDoing this, though, is a headache accounting-wise for businesses,\u201d he cautioned, so the platform would also need to \u201cprovide a good accounting feature.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another model, \u201cexchanges would host BTCPay on behalf of their user and automatically convert to fiat like BitPay is doing. This would solve accounting issues,\u201d Dorier said, although this function also veers toward the same centralized, custodial services that BTCPay was built to avoid.<\/p>\n

Fiat support troubles aside, BTCPay\u2019s success was sprung on Dorier to a point. As we briefly mentioned, the platform began as a side project. Now, the formerly one-man job has turned into a wellspring of open-source development, and Dorier, who holds down two contractor positions at Metaco and DG Lab, said he is \u201creaching his limit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy current challenge is about not being a bottleneck \u2026 Nowadays, I can’t keep up with the number of issues and pull requests to review. I find it hard to spend more time on developing features I want because of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, a group of Bitcoin-faithful developers have helped to lighten his load, most notably the pseudonymous BitcoinShirt, Rockstardev and Kukks. With their work, these developers have also increased awareness, something that no doubt adds to Dorier\u2019s burden as BTCPay grows.<\/p>\n

Of course, this growth, while cumbersome, means the platform is thriving. And Dorier has plans to expand its offerings further, adding such features as a crowdfunding app, shareable invoices, atomic swaps and a wallet restoration function.<\/p>\n

As BTCPay expands, Dorier hopes to continue to lengthen the already impressive strides of the 1-year-old payment processor, with the end goal of overtaking the industry\u2019s frontrunner.<\/p>\n

\u201cBTCPay is giving back the power directly to the user. And I want to prove that we can compete, and even overtake the ease of use of centralized services \u2026 Ironically, centralized services are making themselves more and more difficult to use because of KYC\/AML regulations. BTCPay is becoming easier and easier because we are solving a user-experience problem, not a regulatory one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BTCPay has become a meteoric success. But for what started out as a hobbyist\u2019s side project, this success has, in some respects, become unwieldy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3468,"featured_media":21125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[783,153,1294,477],"class_list":{"0":"post-21124","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technical","8":"tag-bitpay","9":"tag-btcpay","10":"tag-btcpayserver","11":"tag-payments"},"author_data":{"id":3468,"name":"Aaron Van Wirdum And Colin Harper","nicename":"aaron-van-wirdum-and-colin-harper","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/88b6c65a7515990786b1c04473e15469e5b0d0fffef947ed629a60854e1cb426?s=96&d=robohash&r=g"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/a-year-after-launch.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3468"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}