Payment processor Stripe experimenting with Bitcoin acceptance

Stripe, the online payment processor that graduated from Y Combinator in 2010, announced last week that it was testing Bitcoin support and would be opening up to beta testing in the near future.

At the moment, experimentation with the currency is quite limited. Tarsnap, a cryptographic online backup provider, has partnered with Stripe to test out Bitcoin payments.

Tarsnap founder Colin Percival announced the joint project Thursday on his own blog:

“There is a significant commonality between Tarsnap and Bitcoin — both rely crucially on strong cryptography, and anecdotally it seems that many Bitcoin users rely on Tarsnap to back up their ‘wallets’ (I have no concrete data since I can’t tell what data people are backing up) — so it’s not surprising that many Tarsnap users would like to pay with bitcoins,” he wrote.

“There is an even stronger connection to many of the ‘alternative cryptocoins,’ since many make use of the scrypt key derivation function which I developed for securing Tarsnap’s passphrase-protected key files.”