When comparing Stripe vs Bitcoin, the Slant community recommends Stripe for most people. In the question“What are the best online payments APIs outside of the USA?” Stripe is ranked 1st while Bitcoin is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Stripe is:
Stripe is very simple for developers to integrate into their application as it is a "works out of the box" solution with a fantastic API. The Stripe API is incredibly simple to setup, for example creating a new charge with Ruby is simply: require "stripe" Stripe.api_key = "vtUQeOtUnYr7PGCLQ96Ul4zqpDUO4sOE" Stripe::Charge.create( :amount => 400, :currency => "usd", :card => { :number => "4242424242424242", :exp_month => 1, :exp_year => 2014, :cvc => 314 }, :description => "Charge for test@example.com" )
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very Easy to Setup
Stripe is very simple for developers to integrate into their application as it is a "works out of the box" solution with a fantastic API.
The Stripe API is incredibly simple to setup, for example creating a new charge with Ruby is simply:
require "stripe"
Stripe.api_key = "vtUQeOtUnYr7PGCLQ96Ul4zqpDUO4sOE"
Stripe::Charge.create(
:amount => 400,
:currency => "usd",
:card => {
:number => "4242424242424242",
:exp_month => 1,
:exp_year => 2014,
:cvc => 314
},
:description => "Charge for test@example.com"
)
Pro Very competitive fees
Pro Great Documentation
Pro Supports online marketplaces
Stripe have recently announced support for online marketplaces. This means a service can now enable their users to seamlessly collect payments using the Stripe API.
Pro Biggest market capitalization
Pro Most widely accepted cryptocurrency by merchants
Cons
Con They have very complicated and expensive pricing for marketplaces
See here.
Con Takes a long time for transaction to confirm
It takes on average 10 minutes for a block to be added to the blockchain. You may want to wait for multiple blocks to be added to the blockchain to be sure that there's no tampering happening with the blockchain. The usual recommendation for larger transactions is to wait for 6 blocks before confirming the transaction which comes down to an hour on average.
Con Mining is expensive
Con Big whales manipulating price
Con Overpriced
Con Volatile
Con Toxicity
Con Terrible for the environment
Bitcoin wastes enormous amounts of energy on each transaction