I may be leaving a little cash on the table by not taking crypto contributions. What's a simple way receive payments and convert them to USD? I am not really interested in holding crypto currency.
Honestly, I quit paying attention once I understood the carbon footprint of individual BTC transactions.
But supposedly, since The Merge, ETH has reduced consumption by 99.99%, though that has been called into question.
- https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/10/11/one-year-after-the-merge-sustainability-of-ethereums-proof-of-stake-is-uncertain/?sh=20ce5f94308e
In any case, if you want to accept, but not hold, crypto, you'll need some payment gateway, just like a CC, but they'll only take 1% instead of 3%.
I only looked into it. I have never actually used any, so this is not an endorsement or anything, just a direction.
I think the easiest is just Paypal - "Let customers check out with crypto while you get paid in cash."
https://www.paypal.com/us/business/accept-payments/checkout
Paypal is not a bad option for e-comm in general if you're selling direct for relatively low-dollar items. In one store I ran, a lot of people opt for it (maybe because of convenience, but I think it's because of trust). It was our main payment gateway for years (that store is on Shopify since 2018 and uses ShopPay, so I'm a bit out of the loop on Paypal).
There are others of course but my complete experience for these is this guide that I just googled for, so not a personal recommendation in any way.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-cryptocurrency-payment-gateway
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/accept-bitcoin-business/
>>our main payment gateway
meaning it was our CC processor, which was transparent to most people, but also gave the option for people to pay from their Paypal account. Since I didn't do the books, I have no idea whether people used the crypto option or whether it was even available then.
PayPal makes sense from convenience standpoint. It's a little embarrassing how little I actually know about cryptocurrency. I have seen people post QR codes that allow some type of automatic crypto payment. That's pretty nifty.
I had a neighbor who was bombarding me with stuff to get me to buy BTC "before it's too late." He went so far as to give me $100 in BTC so that I would have to get a wallet and figure all that stuff out.
He was pressuring me to put a lot of money in to "secure your financial future." The $100 he gave me dropped to $44 and then, for reasons I do not understand, dropped to $0, either because my wallet was hacked or one of the big bankruptcies affected it. So that's how much I know about crypto, I successfully turned a $100 gift into $0 in BTC. That's about as deep into it as I want to get.