BitPay Now Requires $100 Invoice Minimum Due to Bitcoin Miner Fees

[alert title='BitPay Update']
BitPay reversed it's $100 invoice requirement in less than 24 hours and no longer require a $100 minimum invoice. The new amount requirement is $5.
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BitPay service continues degrading claiming miner fees are to blame. The company has announced an emergency change in it's policy of accepting bitcoin for merchant payment processing. It will no longer accept allow invoices for less than $100.

It's also enforcing a QR protocol that requires 10 times the average network fee to be paid rendering it further as useless as the blockchain itself right now.

Any chance of sending payment in a group through a wallet service or exchange are gone at this point requiring fees upwards of $35 dollars to pay an invoice for $100.

Loading BitPay's Visa card will run around $35 or more as we outlined earlier this week.

The $100 invoice is somewhat understandable due to the miner fees, the QR code makes little sense without the option to bypass it and send to an actual wallet address. It creates and messy and clumsy payment process prone to error and confusion and subject to double the fees since you have to send bitcoin first to either their wallet or one of two other wallets they correctly support.

Bad Week for BitPay

Given the BitPay card fiasco and now the $100 invoice requirement, its been a bad week for BitPay during a crucial growth opportunity.

This could be purposely fabricated since it appears as is BitPay may be making a move to another token such as Bitcoin Cash for payments. They already support the token in their wallet and have announced that they will soon support it for invoices.

Forcing people to pay the highest fees seems to be a statement directed at the mining community who may end up without BitPay 1 billion in transaction fees next year if they drop bitcoin or offer another token for use.

Moving to another token makes sense for BitPay. It certainly can't rely on bitcoin use if the price of sending it is going to continue to be 30%-50% or more of the purchase price.

Miners are fair to blame here. Despite network rules suggesting the high fees, miners do have control over the fees with configuration. Thus, in addition to solutions available to reduce fees not adopted with full consensus by miners, the have also done nothing to alleviate the issue themselves and are making millions daily on fees. Literally.

Other merchants are moving to other coins and looking for alternative methods of payment as its customers are simply not able reasonably use bitcoin anymore to pay for anything.

[info title='Update 12/24/2017']
BitPay reversed it's $100 minimum. Invoices are now required to be at least $5.
[/info]

$5 is certainly an improvement, but it still doesn't explain the ridiculous fees being required. BitPay explains that errors on behalf of users sending payment with a low few would sometimes takes days to confirm. The new QR protocol creates a rule that throw an exception if the fee is too low and automatically sets the highest fee for sending payments resulting in an unnecessary fee albeit a more likely successful transaction.

However, more advanced users know how to successfully broadcast a transaction that will result in a confirmation within 30 minutes or less, so limiting those users requiring them to pay additional fees and send multiple transactions to end up in a wallet BitPay supports (there's only 4 and two of those are BitPay related) seems a bit unfair.

Regardless of an invoice for $100 or $5 there is still the same ridiculous fee(s) involved. How much will spending $5 at a merchant using BitPay costs you? Before miner fees, it about $29.

After miner fees enforced by BitPay the total to send $5 is around .... $50.

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