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I work for Stripe. While people anywhere around the world can pay with Bitcoin (and we've seen payments from over 60 countries during our beta), we currently only support merchants who have U.S. bank accounts. (Fun fact: Our first Bitcoin user had a Canadian Stripe account, but also a U.S. bank account.)

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And can you clarify if by us bank account you mean 'us dollar denominated', or 'us dollar denominated and a us bank'. USD bank accounts are very common in Canada.

Not that needing a US bank account is necessarily a show-stopper, but it's more work.

USD-denominated and a U.S. bank for now.

Thanks for the clarification. Could a Canadian Stripe user just start using the API and then go open a us bank account after launch, or would the us bank account be needed prior to going live?

You can get everything set up in test mode, but you will need to activate the bank account before going live. If helpful, there's more info on testing here: https://stripe.com/docs/testing#how-do-i-test-bitcoin

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