Coinvoice begins processing payments from BTC to USD

Coinvoice has added the ability for merchants to have their customers pay in BTC and receive a USD payout, similar to other BTC payment processors.  This means that Coinvoice merchants can bill their customers in BTC and receive USD or bill in USD and receive BTC.  Our goal is to provide the most flexible set of payment options for merchants so they can focus on making sales rather than converting between BTC and USD.

Coinvoice BTC invoice step 1

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Redecentralization: building a robust cryptocurrency developer network

As it was originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was conceived of as a peer-to-peer system that was fundamentally decentralized.  Many past and current discussions about the future of Bitcoin acknowledge that too much centralization is a threat to the Bitcoin network.  To some extent this process of avoiding centralization has been successful, but in several key areas it has not been very successful and it is in need of redecentralization.  The most pressing case for redecentralization in Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies more generally) is the current development community:

  • the number of developers who have experience developing cryptocurrencies is very low, I would estimate there are less than 100 such developers
  • the majority of the developers are located in the US and other “Western” nations
  • the developer incentive structure with successful cryptocurrencies creates conflicts of interest

In what follows, I propose solutions to these issues cited above.  Since we develop our own full-node Bitcoin implementation, btcd, the criticism of the developer community status quo that follows applies not only to other developers, but also our developers who work on btcd.

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