Overstock.com to accept Bitcoin for payment in 2014

This is a watershed moment.

http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-first-major-us-retailer-bitcoin/

 

Never heard of them :lol:

 

Mega online retailer in the US. Missus has bought off them a heap of times.

 

Of course it's pumping - just like every single bullish article on gold and silver. It's an example of the growth of the Bitcoin economy, and probably the largest traditional business to date to accept Bitcoin.

Actually being online, I don't think Overstock.com takes cash. Such a fifteenth century payment model.

Which is perfectly fine. I sincerely doubt that any of their suppliers accept Bitcoin yet as a payment method, so holding onto them would put them in the position of being a Bitcoin speculator, and that's not their core business model.

Haven't seen a company this size announce they are "accepting gold and silver" as payment, which have far larger market caps than the ~$8b in Bitcoin. Wouldn't be terribly difficult for say Walmart to accept gold and silver eagles at point of sale (what's an XRF machine per store to a company that size) that automatically gets fed into a hedging model that sells a resulting amount of metal on a corresponding market. Haven't seen it yet though.

It's a perfect fit for an online model - but it will be very interesting to see how this goes down with whatever banks Overstock deal with, which are usually the ones carrying the big stick frightening companies into NOT accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. Shoe is on the other foot here - if you were a business banking sales rep and you landed the Overstock account, you would retire on the commission payment.

An example of everything that is *wrong* with crypto-currencies, unless you argue it's an example of the democratisation of currency, and that in itself makes it a good thing.

Takeaway of the story for me is that until you start seeing large business accepting anything other than Bitcoin, the rest is purely speculative - and should be treated as such. PayPal have some horrible policies, and there's legions of the web dedicated to pointing out how bad they are, but it didn't stop them from becoming the single most accepted online payment provider in the West.

 

A currency based on a joke meme reaching $8m market cap while Bitcoin is crashing - I'm referring to the mass speculation side of crypto currencies where anyone with some programming and photoshop skills can spin up a copy from Github, make a few tweaks, publish it on reddit and call it a new currency while they get a few mates to start mining like crazy, and in turn create something apparently worth millions, and it's only value is the pure speculation that it will be worth something tomorrow, or that someone notable will be pumping it in a YouTube video in 2 weeks. Bitcoin on the other hand has a huge mining presence providing the processing infrastructure, and actual acceptance by real-world merchants who will allow you to exchange it for stuff.

Bit like bismuth bullion.

I wonder how the owner of the particular Shiba Inu feels about someone using the image of their pet for an $8m crypto coin that is probably making the creator filthy rich.

That's entirely feasible - however I think currency has a bit of Darwinism built into it - Bitcoin alone currently accounts for 92% by value of the the top 55 cryptocurrencies combined (including such clangers as Junkcoin and Sexcoin), what need is there for someone to worry about integrating other coins as payment methods if 90% of the purchasing power is concentrated into a single solution. Bit like an Australian retailer getting a merchant facility for American Express - which according to Forbes is the 26th most valuable brand in the world (ahead of Visa at 34 and Mastercard at 67), yet it's implementation in Australia is a distant third to those two, because banks don't push that brand solution as much as Visa or Mastercard, so there's a miniscule number of cards in circulation compared to the former. Yet to meet someone who only has an AmEx and not another brand credit card in their wallet, so the likelyhood of a merchant missing out on a sale because they don't accept AmEx is negligible.

Funnily enough I ran into our AmEx account rep at a food court in Melbourne on Thursday, and we were joking about the little "NO AMEX" dymo label the store had on their EFTPOS terminal.

 

Are you kidding me? This forum is full of people who would want to be able to drop a few oz at Coles or Woolies on groceries, particularly if it was an easy way to cash in on any capital gains.

Bullion dealer hat on - the number of people who buy fractional silver coins, or exclusively buy 1oz coins (by the monster box) because "one day that's all the shops will take" is astounding. PLENTY of people buying physical silver are doing so with the express intention of having a spendable medium of exchange for whatever economic scenarios they envisage. Can't really elaborate more other than to say some clients buy nothing other than ASE or Maple monster boxes because one day they plan on "spending them".

Bitcoin is attractive to some merchants because of the reduced fraud risks with no chargebacks - and given wallet management website Blockchain has ~800,000 customers, US Coinbase ~650,000 customers etc, there's plenty of people already with BTC balances that don't need to go and buy a Bitcoin in order to spend it.

Spending a bitcoin poses higher security risks for a customer? Such as? I take it you've never had your credit card details stolen before and had to deal with unwinding the mess it creates? There's also plenty of retailers out there offering discounts for payment in BTC (up to 15% I've seen reported online), so where is the higher price - especially if you're taking advantage of the volatility and spending on a high from where you bought or mined? Where is the counterparty risk in spending a Bitcoin? Are you referring to exchanges which most bitcoiners agree are NOT the place to store your Bitcoins unless you're actively trading them?

There's hundreds of thousands of people out there with Bitcoins - smart money (bankers backlash permitting) will accept them for payment, *particularly* because the volatility risk *can* be eliminated for the merchant through the use of a payment gateway provider.

 

Not much difference to buying a Borders gift card then hey. Is a merchant going under leaving customers as unsecured creditors unique to Bitcoin?