Stripe's Terms of Service reveal that they use Coinbase in the backend to transact and exchange the bitcoins: https://stripe.com/bitcoin/terms If you are a small merchant planning to do less than $1-2 million dollars in sales, you might still prefer using Coinbase directly instead of Stripe though, because Coinbase waives all fees until the first $1 million dollars (then it's 1%), but Stripe charges a constant 0.5% fee.
Edit: @ThrustVectoring: it does not take 5 weeks of a developer's time to integrate with Coinbase, especially for the "small" merchants (<$1-2M in sales) that my comment was written for. But I agree the appeal of simplicity if you already take Stripe is there :)
You can integrate bitcoin support into Stripe Checkout with just a few lines of code - one attribute on the client, and 2-3 lines of extra code to create your Charge object in a different way on the server, at which point you process it in almost exactly the same way as a card payment (potentially minus some UI details in confirmation messages, etc).
Integrating Coinbase involves writing your own "payment" abstraction in place of being able to use Stripe's all the way through your application, then implementing both Stripe and Coinbase on top of that. While this might be good in the long run (so you can switch off of Stripe easily), it's not so good for smaller shops/services which don't need that complexity yet.
Why is the choice to accept bitcoins client-side? If I want to force a payment in bitcoins, I can add the attribute myself.
Some businesses have legal ramifications for accepting bitcoin or not, even if it's through Stripe. Is there a flag in your Stripe merchant account on Stripe's server to refuse bitcoins?
> Why is the choice to accept bitcoins client-side? If I want to force a payment in bitcoins, I can add the attribute myself.
No, that's not the case. The choice to display the UI for accepting bitcoins is client-side. Handling the results of that UI still has to be done specially on the server, through the creation of a Charge in a different way.
There is a tad more info from https://twitter.com/stripe :
"Our Bitcoin support is now fully live: https://stripe.com/bitcoin ."
"It's fully-integrated with the rest of Stripe: same APIs, same reporting, same dashboard. (Just like our Alipay support.)"
"While testing our Bitcoin support, we had people from 60 different countries use it to pay. (Howdy, Guatemala, Algeria, Rwanda, Cambodia!)"
"Particular thanks to @Namecheap, @Tarsnap, @HandUp, and @Grooveshark for their feedback as we developed this."
"And as for https://stripe.com/bitcoin itself -- this is our first, but hopefully not last, page to feature an animated Vim."
For the record, Stripe's Bitcoin support has been in beta since March 2014. Tarsnap were the first users: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.h...
Edit: @ThrustVectoring: it does not take 5 weeks of a developer's time to integrate with Coinbase, especially for the "small" merchants (<$1-2M in sales) that my comment was written for. But I agree the appeal of simplicity if you already take Stripe is there :)