One of Bitcoin's greatest innovations is its solution to the problem of double-spending with digital currency.
But while the Bitcoin network does prevent double-spend transactions from being added to the Bitcoin blockchain, some attempted double-spend transactions that are broadcast can fool businesses into delivering a product before the transactions are fully confirmed by the Bitcoin network.
We've already mitigated this risk by providing an array of transaction speed options in our BitPay merchant dashboard. Merchants can choose at what confirmation risk level they want to ship their goods: Low (6 confirmations), Medium (1 confirmation, our default setting for new merchants), or High (0 confirmations).
Some merchants want to use a High transaction speed setting to deliver goods instantly. This is a nice customer satisfaction feature, but these merchants take on an elevated risk of fraud if these incoming transactions never confirm.
For many years, BitPay has offered a feature to our Enterprise customers which analyzes incoming transactions and determines if they have a higher-than-normal risk of not being confirmed. We proactively adjust these higher-risk invoices to a Medium transaction speed while letting lower-risk payments proceed at High speed.
Today, we are excited to expand the availability of this feature to our full merchant base. For those merchants that rely on BitPay's notifications to fulfill orders, this high-speed risk mitigation will provide an additional level of protection against fraudulent orders.
Our merchants will still have the option to take on the risk of accepting high-risk payments with zero confirmations. By turning off our High Speed Risk Mitigation feature in their dashboards, merchants can accept all payments at High speed, regardless of their risk level.
