Dear customers,

We’re writing to you today because we are making a change to how we charge our customers when they buy Bitcoins from us. Up until now, we only charged a markup on customers’ transactions; however, as of April 19th, we will also charge a flat fee of $3 on transactions that are under $200. Until further notice, no flat fee will be charged on transactions that are equal or above $200.

It isn’t a decision that pleases us very much, but we wanted to give you some background as to why we’ve decided to charge a flat fee on smaller transactions.

You see, transactions on the Bitcoin network require senders to pay a fee, no matter the amount of Bitcoin that is being sent. When we started selling Bitcoins, that fee was approximately $0.80. As it was pretty small and we hated the idea of charging customers a flat fee, we had decided to take it on us. However, as Bitcoin’s price is on the rise, it now costs us over $6.00 every time you make a purchase. Unfortunately, the higher the price of Bitcoin goes, the more expensive it becomes for us to process your transaction. As a result, we are losing a lot of money on small transactions. Bitcoin has great potential, so we need to mitigate that problem as soon as possible.

All cryptocurrency companies are facing this issue and the standard way of dealing with it is to pass the transaction fee along to the customer.

We decided to share that fee with customers purchasing amounts that are under $200. That way, we’re still not making any profits on small transactions, but at least, we limit the bleeding on our end. Our goal is to reduce the occurrences where customers buy small amounts of Bitcoin regularly – say, $50 every day – and incentivize them instead to buy larger amounts on a less frequent basis. If we can make that happen, then this would be a win-win scenario.

That being said, the withdrawal fee is subject to change depending on how Bitcoin evolves. We will keep you updated with the latest developments.

Regards,

Pascal Bergeron, CEO of bitMachina

Christophe Désormeaux, COO of bitMachina