First hinting at his project in a reply to a BitPay tweet on August 2017, Nicolas Dorier boldly claimed that BTCPay would make one of crypto’s most popular payment processors obsolete. In an r/Bitcoin post two months later, he clarified that his brainchild isn’t meant to “take the place of BitPay.” Rather, BTCPay is poised as a new and improved alternative, a decentralized stand-in for merchants who wanted an easier way to accept bitcoin. A year later, the project has grown larger than Dorier anticipated. With a community of open-source developers at its back and growing demand from a faithful user base, the payment processor has expanded its support past bitcoin and has integrated with many of the web’s most popular point-of-sale (PoS) plug-ins. It has become a meteoric success. But for what started out as a hobbyist’s side project, this success has, in some respects, become unwieldy.A Fork in Response to a Fork Dorier launched BTCPay at a time when a contentious proposed Bitcoin hard fork was sending tremors through the community. BitPay’s approach to this hotly contested fork, Dorier told Bitcoin Magazine, was part of the reasoning behind BTCPay’s creation.“BTCPay was created when BitPay was trying to force all their merchants to use another altcoin instead of Bitcoin. The priority for BTCPay was to make sure that all software written to work on BitPay will work on BTCPay with minimal (or no) chang...
