As a business owner, you want to see what this Bitcoin thing is all about and want to integrate its payments into your infrastructure. Doing all of this can be daunting if you’re not tech-inclined or if you’ve got other tasks to manage. This is where MBC can help out.
Bitcoin is in the beginning stages of becoming a monetary standard, a store of value and a method of payment and exchange. This article won’t get into the details of why and how (plenty out there to get your information but I recommend reading Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard as a good first step), but will provide a few options of what to do in general to incorporate it in your business.
Bitcoin as a method of payment is built on two payment rails currently: 1)Bitcoin – the main chain and 2)Lightning Network – the 2nd layer. The Bitcoin layer makes up the blockchain (the public ledger) and records transaction every ten minutes on average and has a higher cost of transaction. The Lightning Network (a 2nd layer or subordinate layer to Bitcoin) is a faster and cheaper way to send transactions. Both layers have their benefits but I will focus on Lightning for the speed and the low cost of transactions for the remainder fo this article for business-use case.
Lightning Network payments are based on bitcoin but are transacted on the sub-layer 2 network. These transactions are “off-chain” and hence fast (completed and confirmed in a few seconds) and cheap (fractions of a % fees generally). Businesses integrate Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments together with various tools including BTCPayServer and LNBits. These tools have integrations to point of sale front-ends such as WooCommerce and BTCRetailX (our point of sale offering). It’s fascinating technology and it’s ready for commercial use.
Unless you have the bandwidth, managing a lightning node takes effort, energy and money. If you want to take on this roll, MBC can assist with the setup. It’s an honorable endeavor if you choose to go that route as you support the Lightning Network by doing so. You also have 3rd party options such as opennode to provide the lightning channel management on their side and just provide the proceeds back to you, along with their transaction fees (which is substantially cheaper than traditional credit cards).
MBC has the skills to install and manage your own nodes of bitcoin core and lightning network as well as integrating these payments into your legacy or new tech systems.
Please reach out to us for a quote and business review.
Doug