Yes, but of course the exchange rate matters as well. It's trivial for Bitcoin payment processors hide an extra "fee" in the exchange rate by giving you a worse exchange rate than you'd get at Bitcoin exchanges and pocketing the difference. (I have no idea if Stripe does that or not)

We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.

Awesome work! I've been trying to push bitcoin at our company as a form of payment, we use Stripe already, so this will make it easier.

Inherent to Stripe processing BTC is the fact that you are now a foreign exchange broker. Here's a small sample of why you're going to have to do a lot better than "we only charge 0.5%" to convince me that adding FX risk into my payment processing stack is a good idea:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-12/banks-manip...

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/banks-will-...

And that's just from the last three months, in an arena that is already heavily regulated by the SEC.

Hm? As a business selling with Stripe, you won't be taking any FX risk. You request $20, and you receive $20 - 0.5%.

I am a huge fan of Matt Levine's work, but the articles you reference are about banks who participate in the FX markets, which is... different.

(Relevant disclosure: I work at Stripe.)

Marking it up from what? There isn't really a canonical exchange rate.

That cost would be borne by the customer, won't it? I guess that's still in some sense a fee from the Stripe vendor's perspective, because the Bitcoin price will be higher for the customer and thus the quantity demanded will be lower than it would be with the vendor's USD sticker price.

Wait, am I missing something or does coinbase not do this for free... or do they nab you some other way

Coinbase charges a BTC <-> USD fee of 1%. Stripe is essentially charging for the same exchange service, but 0.5% instead.

"Avoid exchange rate hassles—specify amounts in USD and we’ll send you dollars. Stripe charges just 0.5% per successful Bitcoin transaction."

Coinbase does this for free, but they'll take their cut if you try to convert that into dollars. And they don't have a card option as well. This makes it dead simple for anyone to offer Bitcoin while automatically complying with the same reporting regulations as card payments.

Coinbase is free for the first million dollars in transactions. Bitpay is free IIRC.

Last I checked, Stripe worked on top of the Coinbase API. The main benefit to using Stripe is that's it's one api and one account. For merchants, you also get fiat instead of holding bitcoin (I assume this is what the fee is primarily for). If you're already using Stripe checkout, adding bitcoin can be done in less than 5 lines of code.