Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.
For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken
lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.
I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).
They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle.
It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.
So, this is 'open' as in 'OpenAI', not as in 'open source'. What's the benefit of this compared to something like NOW Payments for merchants (or the myriad of alternatives)? NOW Payments supports a wide range of crypto currencies as well.
I don't have much substance to add to the discussion but this kind of topic is very relevant to the GNU project Taler which aims to bring an open payment infrastructure to general use/"the market".
They have significant investment and institutional interest notably from the EU and established organisations such as NLNet.
I am not affiliated but figure this deserves more attention, especially in this conversation.
Ironically, OpenAI would be trademarkable because they're not open.
> OPEN describes a feature of the services provided by applicant, in that applicant provides a "public node" that is accessible to anyone and allows users to interact with the blockchain network. See attached from opennode.com. Thus, "OPEN" is descriptive of the applicant's services, in that it conveys the open and public nature of the node that the applicant provides.
I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively.
The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin.
You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.
Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it.
Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
They've been in business for a long time and I used them when I experimented with QR code for street artists to receive tips. OpenNode is very simple to implement!
You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.
Interesting to see that this crypto thing might still have legs, as someone who's invested a lot of time (and thankfully, not a painful amount of money) into the idea.
Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.
And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.
American-style words are really hard these days. I thought 'open' meant source code is available, but at some point, starting with OpenAI, it seems like 'open' has come to mean 'we'll open your wallet.
The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.
>Bitcoin - the only legitimate cryptocurrency secure enough for transacting at scale.
I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.
DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.
If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.
It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.
The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.
Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.
Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.
Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.
For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken
lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.
I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).
Monero is even cheaper and more useful as cadh because it's private. Anyone can see Bitcoin history and where the user got their coins.
They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle. It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.
CIA uses Bitcoin for intelligence gathering: https://cryptobriefing.com/cia-bitcoin-intelligence-gatherin...
Really? Did we IT people decide giving up privacy for security is a good idea?
It's hardly just them. This tech has been commercialized for over a decade.
https://www.chainalysis.com/blockchain-intelligence/
They also do work to deanonymize other blockchains, including monero.
The main grifters care for neither.
Lightning payments are not stored onchain and have already been proved more private than monero payments
So, this is 'open' as in 'OpenAI', not as in 'open source'. What's the benefit of this compared to something like NOW Payments for merchants (or the myriad of alternatives)? NOW Payments supports a wide range of crypto currencies as well.
I don't have much substance to add to the discussion but this kind of topic is very relevant to the GNU project Taler which aims to bring an open payment infrastructure to general use/"the market". They have significant investment and institutional interest notably from the EU and established organisations such as NLNet. I am not affiliated but figure this deserves more attention, especially in this conversation.
https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
Why this instead of the opensource, well used, and trusted BTCPay that you can self-host and has 0% fees?
Is it open source? If not, why choose the name “OpenNode”?
Just like how OpenAI is open source.
Open as in "The door is open come in and give us your money"
Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)
So, OpenAI is certainly never trademarked? /s
Ironically, OpenAI would be trademarkable because they're not open.
> OPEN describes a feature of the services provided by applicant, in that applicant provides a "public node" that is accessible to anyone and allows users to interact with the blockchain network. See attached from opennode.com. Thus, "OPEN" is descriptive of the applicant's services, in that it conveys the open and public nature of the node that the applicant provides.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97399846&docI...
they just lost a case in Europe about being trademarked
"Open as in wallet"
Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering
OpenAI rings a bell
Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases?
The buying power is all over the place.
I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
> with active sanctions against.
Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?
Someone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries. Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system. Or both.
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.
This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
Even if you're willing to operate fully in the "tradfi" system, your counterparty might not be, and you still want their business.
There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
4) Lowered friction for international transaction
5) One or both sides can be unbanked.
> (potentially) lower transaction fees
<transactionFeeDiscussion>
Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP.
For Bitcoin it's not even close.
</transactionFeeDiscussion>
This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively. The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin. You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Wire transfer is better?
Way to not read the comment. Or at least understand it. Nobody uses wire transfer for "everyday shopping".
Worst for whom?
Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.
Until customers don't want to but because they are afraid they have no way to get their money back if anything goes wrong.
(Chargeback exists for a reason, and the reason isn't to piss off businesses).
It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.
Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
This! And this is why the “crypto” world is full of scams and heists, in a way that anyone with a brain could have foreseen from the start.
It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it. Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
Not all that different from losing your physical wallet with your ID and debit card or giving your bank info to a Nigerian Prince.
Pick your poison, do you trust corrupt institutions or yourself more.
Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
It comes down to how much you trust the government, central banks, and the institutions of power, especially post Epstein and COVID.
They've been in business for a long time and I used them when I experimented with QR code for street artists to receive tips. OpenNode is very simple to implement!
Broken link on the pricing page "How did we calculate this number " -> https://help.opennode.com/en/articles/3179796-where-are-open... -> "Uh oh. That page doesn’t exist. Try searching for your answer or just send us a message."
I’m a little confused by the fees. In their pricing page (https://opennode.com/pricing) it says:
You request $100, the customer pays 0.00152 BTC, and then you get $99.
But 0.00152 BTC is almost $100? If I’m a business why would I pay $100 in BTC fees for a $100 transaction?
What is this solving? I’ll never understand crypto.
Edit: nvm I’m dumdum. Will get coffee. Thanks to everyone who replied.
$100 is the transaction value,it is not the cost of the transaction fees.
The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.
You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.
It sounds like the fee is about $1.00: the delta between $100 and $99.
??
The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD
Interesting to see that this crypto thing might still have legs, as someone who's invested a lot of time (and thankfully, not a painful amount of money) into the idea.
Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.
And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.
when we will finally have good self-hosted, open-source, BTC gateways?
You mean payment processing? BTCPay Server is the defacto standard I would argue.
Have used it for accepting LN transactions for years.
Does it support Monero?
American-style words are really hard these days. I thought 'open' meant source code is available, but at some point, starting with OpenAI, it seems like 'open' has come to mean 'we'll open your wallet.
And that isn't even the original meaning either! "open source" in reference to software was itself a term stolen from the intelligence community.
"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.
The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.
Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.
Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.
This would be more interesting with other coins. Monero or cash come to mind
> or cash come to mind
Did you mean Bitcoin Cash?
not your keys, not your money.
>Bitcoin - the only legitimate cryptocurrency secure enough for transacting at scale.
I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.
Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging
DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.
TIL DAI cannot be frozen. Perhaps the first stablecoins I might be a little interested in.
The merchant should send the funds (sweep the UTXO) back to you if the funds are flagged. So you should not be out of pocket.
Stablecoins can be censored. You deposited into Huobi 5 years ago? Banned. Now we keep your stablecoins, thanks for playing.
You can't censor Bitcoin.
>You can't censor Bitcoin.
Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.
That's an excellent reason to get rid of them and just make P2P cash payments
As a Chinese person I can confirm. Monero is the way.
Also BCH + CashFusion for extra privacy
If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.
It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.
The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.
Why not just accept Monero? It acts more like cash. Do you really want to leak every transaction you've ever done, every time you buy something?
Bitcoin is surveillance capitalism dream!
Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.
Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.
> Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments
Indeed, but fortunately, BTC was forked at the right time
Lightning ain't slow though.
Looks solid
Glad to see such initiative on bitcoin !