Reddit Suspends The Option of Bitcoin Payment For Its Gold Membership Plan

Popular social media website Reddit has suspended the option for Bitcoin payment for its Reddit Gold Membership plan. The introduction of the Bitcoin Payments on the Reddit platform was first done in February 2013 in partnership with popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

The removal of Bitcoin payment’s option allows users to purchase the Gold membership with only two payments options - credit cards and PayPal. Moreover, it is still unclear whether this feature may return to the platform anytime again.

The issue came to surface on last Friday, March 23rd, when several users started to comment on the /r/BTC subreddit stating that they could not see the Bitcoin option of payment for upgrading or renewing their ‘Gold’ membership.

The next day, responding to the same post, the administrator “emoney04” confirmed that Bitcoin payment option has been disabled due to the fact that Coinbase has discounted with those merchant tools that Reddit used to use to accept Bitcoins.

The administrator said: “The upcoming Coinbase change, combined with some bugs around the Bitcoin payment option that were affecting purchases for certain users, led us to remove Bitcoin as a payment option.”

Last month, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency platform Coinbase launched a new toll called Coinbase Commerce allowing merchants to accept multiple cryptocurrencies directly into its user-controlled wallet. Even though Coinbase Commerce offers a significant upgrade to its merchants, it has not received much acceptance as it requires merchants to shift to a completely new platform, and hence who see low volumes of crypto payments at their end, don’t consider it to be much worthy enough.

In yet another comment, the admin said that Reddit may not consider it necessary to bring back the Bitcoin payment option to its platform. The admin noted that the company would like to wait for some time if it at all is willing to bring it back.

emoney04 said: “We’re going to take a look at demand and watch the progression of Coinbase Commerce before making a decision on whether to re-enable.”

Founded back in 2005, Reddit currently hosts nearly 40 million users on its platform. The normal membership on the platform is free while the Reddit Gold membership can be availed for a monthly cost of 4 USD, or 30 USD per year. The ‘Gold’ membership of Reddit gives its users additional features on the website like the breakdown of their votes (called ‘karma’) which gives them the ability to load more comments at once and even access a secret subreddit.