PAYMENT PROCESSING: What do we want Vs whats attainable

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Everyone should weigh in on this, but I would also appreciate some technical advise from Reuben as he’s best situated to know our limitations.

For a long time I’ve advocated for censorship resistant yet user friendly ways merchants and users can integrate Firo in online commerce (Wordpress, Woo-commerce etc.).
First so a Firo economy could emerge, and secondly to be a vehicle of growth for Firo by increasing recognition and therefore trust. With one strategy being Firo should be a default payment option.

My personal biggest ‘want’ was to build a multi-coin solution subsidized by CFC so we can ensure Firo is always listed as a payment option. Also as it would be free to merchants, merchants would be incentived to use it in order to save money. A plugin called MyCryptoCheckout has already created such a solution but charges merchants a flat fee and charges crypto projects/devs to be included.
Another reason why I wanted it to be in-house, is we can ensure Firo will not be delisted. Delisting to me seems to be Firo’s biggest risk as more than one payment processor has removed us. First because we are a small coin, and secondly because we are ‘privacy focused’. Also we could ensure our privacy features would always be supported.

I am informed however, there would be a privacy concern with such a plugin as a central server would be tracking payments. Cost also may be a problem, as well as what entity would be hosting the servers. I figured that could be outsourced to trusted partners with a long history of working with Firo.

Another option, is we build a payment server that can be self hosted. This may require merchants to have much higher levels of technical expertise, and therefore greatly limit it’s traction in gaining marketshare that moves the needle. However trusted community members who are technical, perhaps could offer this ‘as a service’ which CFC subsidizes, and then all a merchant would need to do is a one click install and they can start accepting payments. This however would likely be a large and somewhat expensive project, which itself would be a risk for Firo development.

Lastly we could simply pay to be integrated or re-integrated into an existing centralized 3rd party payment system. This is probably the simplest and easiest route to take. However the previously mentioned risks of being delisted or not fully supported would still apply, as well as the fact that Firo itself may receive little to no new recognition if it’s lost in the crowd or the merchant don’t even list it at all. I think we need to be realistic about that. We also need to get an idea on cost of this solution.

Right now Reuben is reaching out to industry professionals and third party providers.

So community, now is probably a good time to speak up and talk about what direction we want to go, and the Pro’s & Con’s of our available options!!!

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IMHO to grow as a project we should become more accessible - exchanges, projects, etc
if we could understand what exactly lead to the recent delistings and work on it - for me is the recommended direction
as per the suggestion above - it will allow more interaction and possibilities with FIRO. strongly support

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As far as I understand delistings are due to Firo’s privacy nature.

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From user point of view I would like to use something similar to MyCryptoCheckout as that doesn’t require you to set any extra server.

After reading your post and conversations in Telegram I am afraid it is impossible to find right balance.

If you want to make it easy for users, you most likely need some centralized service, but then somebody who maintains it needs to have make profit from it, so it will be hard to make sure Firo is prominent there and to avoid some kind of fees.

If you want to have independent solution where Firo is only one or in the centre, user will have to setup server, what will discourage most common users.

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Here are my humble thoughts on the subject:

First of all, the reason for our successive delistings: regulations, particularly in Europe (MICA, MICA2, etc.), are responsible. There’s no point in trying to fight; we won’t win like that. Time is on our side, and states will gradually abandon these liberticidal regulations.

Payments: Any solution that imposes a centralization point should be prohibited, and any solution that involves additional fees should be avoided. For me, and from day one, ZCoin/Firo fulfills the only function Bitcoin lacks: privacy. It seems unrealistic to me to want to make Firo a more advanced payment system than Bitcoin. We must work towards making Firo the ideal complement to Bitcoin, and when Bitcoin becomes a widespread payment system, then Firo will be too. The “vision” for Firo is really that of an ideal complement to Bitcoin: by integrating the code (I don’t think so), by “rollup”, by a level 2 layer, by remaining a blockchain in its own right as today… everything is possible.

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I’ve long believed that we should be able to easily run a Firo node from home with the same ease that you can run an Algorand node and in a self-hosting manner like you can do with a Bitcoin node. That’s true decentralization. Payments and transactions would be routed through those self-hosted nodes. We could connect our wallets directly to our own nodes in the same way Monero does and Bitcoin does with Electrum. Maybe validators could allow their nodes to be used by others in the same way BTCPayServer does.

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I completely agree that self-hosting nodes is an important contribution to decentralization.
This has been discussed several times with the technical team, and it seems to pose too many problems…

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In short, I think we need both centralized and self-hosted but the immediate need should be to get an easy way to accept Firo today that also accepts other major cryptocurrencies. Developing a native solution for Firo alone would be nice and important in the long run but would most likely be limited to a few hardcore users.

In short the system should:

  • To prompt users to pay a FIRO amount to a particular fiat value
  • Allow customers to pay to Spark addresses
  • Allow the merchant to recognize payment and track the status of payment
  • Accept other major cryptocurrencies as well since no one wants to implement multiple solutions for different coins.

The lowest barrier to entry is to consider reactivation on NowPayments.io with Spark payment support. I have a call scheduled with them on Tuesday to explore this. It would likely need some payment and integration work and also some of our Firo community actually integrating and using it to prove to them it’s something worth supporting.

Another one we can approach is Coinpayments.net which already supports FIRO but only the transparent addresses. Interestingly XMR and FIRO are hidden but is somehow stealth supported? Because of this I think it’s unlikely for CoinPayments to want to improve the integration.

While NowPayments is centralized in nature and there’s no guarantee it would not get delisted in the future, if the cost is not too high, it probably is the lowest barrier to entry and also has plugins for WooCommerce and things like that.

A lot of XMR accepting sites still use NowPayments and it goes to show that for most merchants, they just want an easy way to accept it along with other currencies as well. There’s of course the BTCPayserver plugin route which both Monero and Zcash support.

Self-Hosted Option

The self-hosted option would be for more tech-inclined or privacy conscious people. Monero and Zcash still rely heavily on BTCPayserver and their associated plugins and this would be the most obvious path though as far as I understand, being tied to BTCPayserver and the way it works has some limitations (though I need to find out more).

Digilol the company behind MoneroPay (which isn’t a fully fledged solution) is open to helping us develop a solution. They were actually halfway developing something called Metronero as an alternative to BTCPayserver plugin but they failed to get funding as most were happy to use the Monero btcpayserver plugin or NowPayments. They are also open to helping us develop a Nowpayments.io like solution but given that it’s centralized, the big question is who will run it and to add further difficulties, it will also not support other coins off the bat.

To me for the self hosted option, either we go for a BTCpayserver plugin for Firo or another open source solution like SHKeeper which we can see if they’re willing to do an integration or accept a contractor to do it for us. It also has support for various Wordpress, e-commerce plugins and they do accept multi-coins.

These are my thoughts so far, I’ll post more when more comes to mind.

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FCS Proposal - Firo integration with SHKeeper Self hosted payment processor
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As well as low volume. We are a tiny coin and we are going to have far fewer transactions than other larger coins that are big enough to overcome the Gresham’s Law effect that make them worthwhile to payment processors.

My ‘dream’ was for Firo or a Firo adjacent entity to offer an accessible and widely accepted non-custodial payment plugin thats easy and free for the masses of merchants to integrate, with the ‘free’ part providing merchants motivation.

Making Firo a default coin option would raise it’s profile, and the merchants themselves would be onboarded to Firo with every purchase made in Firo.

This would provide the Firo community incentive to pay in Firo as each merchant would now become part of the Firo community (assuming no instant fiat conversion).

Particularly lower crypto volume stores tend to actually add crypto payment options as a convenient way to acquire it. As market cap has a direct relationship to network size, Grahams law may actually assist with merchants not choosing to instantly convert to fiat.

Ultimately if popular, the Firo ‘adjacent’ entity could charge other projects to be included, as well as charge an annual service fee. Perhaps eventually this could provide Core team with development funds when the block reward is minimal.

But as I said, this is just my dream.

There could be some other catalyst that makes Firo a widely known and used coin, and frankly I’m a little surprised that it hasn’t already.

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What about integrating with self-hosting options like Start9, CasaOS, Umbrel, etc? I think more than a few people would use this option if it’s a simple install like it should be, supports Spark, and can connect to wallets and route transactions. Just look at Bitcoin Core integration as an example of how it could work. Setting up my Bitcoin node was super easy. I even have a Bitaxe miner connected. That could be something else to look at with self-hosting too: Solo mining. Sovereignty should be part of the conversation. Self-hosting is catching on and I feel should be part of the endgame. We shouldn’t get left behind.

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SHKeeper said they can do the integration for 2k usd which I think is worthwhile for a selfhosted option. Maybe something the CFC can consider

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Could you show me how it looks like?

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This is from Start9. I’m self-hosting on my own DIY rig. This is the top of the marketplace page where you can choose which apps to install:

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This is just the first page of the available apps. I had BTCPay Server installed but don’t currently have a need for it anymore. It was very easy to install and get it working when I did. I do feel they need more current documentation and their support across all of their channels is lacking:

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This one is for apps made by the community which, if Firo went this route, is where it would most likely end up unless some type of deal is struck with the Start9 main dev team:

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This is just the first page of available community apps. Some are maintained. Some aren’t and actually should be removed or at least tagged. You can see that there’s a Monero node option. The problem with it is that it has install issues and isn’t properly maintained. But if it was, it could run on the same machine as a Bitcoin Core node. And if one chose to mine, obviously the more cores the better:

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These are the apps I have installed currently. Getting the miner setup with Public Pool seemed quite technical but was just a matter of following the instructions which were very clear and made it very easy. Self-hosting a Bitcoin Core node for maximum privacy couldn’t have been more easy and everything has been stable and easy to use. It’s a set and forget type of setup for the most part. I strongly feel this is a route Firo should be building towards to increase privacy and decentralization.

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StartOs/Umbrel integration would be amazing, you could also register a masternode via tailscale for example.

But this is probably quite some work, a web app frontend has to be developed that would talk to firod. It shouldnt be too hard to do, but still some effort…

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Thanks guys, in the mean time proceeding first SHKeeper as one option but not ruling out the others.