Half-arsed but entierly on-brand for them; their merchants don't want to accept bitcoin, they want their preferred fiat currency.

Same goes for buying in EUR and the merchant receiving USD. Buyers get to use their preferred currency (now inc. crypto) and merchants receive theirs.

Merchants' not 'now inc. crypto', though.

Didn't Stripe used to have Bitcoin and then stop supporting it?

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

Bitcoin is not a great option for payments due to the time it takes for a transaction to process/settle and the fees involved.

Also the irreversibility is a huge liability as scammers can just run for the hills and you’re left holding the bag.

Hm. So in essence, you would instantly buy crypto through Stripe, and then they would instantly sell it to someone else? Kind of like a middleman or exchange service?

It's so strange to me that people don't see how that is antithetical to the concept of cryptocurrencies.

The right way to do cryptocurrencies is to just let people use cryptocurrencies. But that means watching your business get eaten up by it. Which is why they are trying to insert themselves so that they don't get disrupted out of existence.

> Let’s hope stripe does it right (crypto from the buyer and crypto to the seller)

Why would you need a middleman for that? Every crypto is already peer to peer.

Smart business like to consolidate their dependencies. If the fee is on the order of 1-2% then the reduced overhead of "where's my money" may be worth it to many small businesses.

There's a lot of supporting structure to nail a point of sale transaction for both sides. It isn't reasonable to expect every business to run bitcoind, handle cold wallet vs hot wallet, and integrate it with their ecommerce system.

Companies want a simple solution that lets them accept the various common ways people want to pay whether that's Paypal balance, any of the credit/debit cards, or any of the other services out there.

Can't you do that already with a hardware wallet?