A letter to Jeff Klee at CheapAir.com

I responded to Jeff Klee's email to all CheapAir customers. Here is a portion of his letter

Dear Traveler,

Since 2013, CheapAir.com has been accepting Bitcoin as a payment option for flight and hotel bookings and we hope to continue to do so well into the future. During this time, it has been a thrill to meet so many extremely smart, incredibly passionate members of the Bitcoin community and we appreciate to no end the support and loyalty that the group has shown us.

However, today we face some challenges and we’re asking for your help in finding solutions. We were recently informed by our processing partner, Coinbase, that they will no longer support “custodial” solutions for merchants, and are removing a number of the tools and features that we rely on to accept Bitcoin from CheapAir.com shoppers. These changes are scheduled to occur in a matter of weeks... redacted for brevity

And my response:

Jeff,

My name is Bill Butler and I am an active participant in the development of the Bitshares Wallet. As you may or may not be aware, Bitshares has been around since 2013. It is based on Dan Larimer's Graphene technology and features 3 second transaction times with 21 second confirmation times. Steem is also based on Graphene and with Bitshares represents 40% of the transaction volume of all crypto combined.

The point I'm trying to make is that Bitshares is built specifically for timely transactions and massive volume. Another valuable feature revolves around the concept of Market Pegged Assets (MPAs). While, in concept, they can be difficult to understand, the represent a huge benefit to vendors because they retain all the advantages of instant transfer, micro fees but add in price stability. The existing MPA's include bitUSD, bitCNY, bitEUR, bitGBP. By accepting these assets, CheapAir can allow users to pay in their preferred "currency" without using fiat.

Our dev team has begun work on a payment module (similar to what bitpay or coinbase has for their assets). If you choose to use the Bitshares network, I would advocate for the Bitshares community to fund a worker proposal to cover your development costs and provide you with an open line of communication to our developers in order to facilitate your payment gateway to the Bitshares network.

Bitshares use case:

Bitspark, https://bitspark.io/, is a Bitcoin-based remittance platform that has chosen to migrate to the Bitshares blockchain. I encourage you to look at their reasoning and hope you agree with their thought process.

Bitshares Technical Resources:

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-pay