Bitcoin Payments Go Live At Overstock — Two Quarters Early 182
New submitter citab writes with news that "the first major retailer is now accepting bitcoins!" In December, Overstock.com announced that they would begin accepting Bitcoin for payment as early as the end of second quarter 2014, but decided to make it a priority task to avoid having someone else beat them to it. From the article: "Last Tuesday, the company struck a deal to handle Bitcoin payments through a service operated by the suddenly hot San Francisco startup Coinbase, and since then, a team of Overstock engineers has worked almost every waking hour to prepare the site for what is undeniably a key moment in the digital currency’s short history. ... [Overstock CEO] Byrne believes this can ultimately boost the company’s bottom line, but that’s not his only aim. For Byrne, a rather opinionated libertarian who’s unafraid to take his company places others fear to tread, embracing the cryptocurrency is as much a political statement as a business decision. Like so many others, he believes Bitcoin can free the world from the control of big banks and big government. 'It helps us fight the machine,' he says."
Fantastic news (Score:2, Interesting)
This is fantastic news, and I hope more major retailers follow.
Re:First major retailer to accept Bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anyone explain why this is marked Funny and not Informative?
It was BTC's "dirty little secret" that as long as you could buy drugs with it, it had value. Losing SR caused panic on the BTC market for exactly that reason.
Re:First major retailer to accept Bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
What does it matter that Overstock is immediately converting bitcoins to USD?
Selling coins reduces the liquidity of the exchanges, purchasing coins increases it.
If a large retailer starts selling a lot of coins but people don't begin buying coins at the same rate, the value of the coin itself drops. They don't have the option in the US (or most countries) to pay their workers in bitcoin, because we made it illegal to use Scrip for paying workers due to the horrible abuses it allowed. And for the most part they don't have the option to use the coin to purchase more inventory because most suppliers still aren't accepting it as payment.
There really isn't any good reason for people to rush out and buy bitcoin just so they can buy stuff on Overstock. So the only people who will actually DO that are people who already have coin in their wallet, or people who are intentionally trying to increase the popularity of the currency.
The bitcoin network has obviously created wealth in the world.
Lol, no it hasn't. All it's done is shift wealth around, there is no inherent value to the coin itself.
People who are getting all Drunk on bitcoin really need to look at what happens when private industry is allowed to control currency and payment systems.
Here's a start: wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
Make no mistake, bitcoin is not nearly as "decentralized" as people would like you to think, and it's not nearly as free from manipulation as is claimed. The difference is that it's the privately owned Exchanges which get to make the rules, as opposed to governments.
Re:First major retailer to accept Bitcoin (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't have the option in the US (or most countries) to pay their workers in bitcoin
This is obviously lie. One counterexample: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/03/kentucky-town-from-colbert-report-to-pay-police-chief-in-bitcoin/ [rawstory.com]
People who are getting all Drunk on bitcoin really need to look at what happens when private industry is allowed to control currency and payment systems.
Here's a start: wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
Make no mistake, bitcoin is not nearly as "decentralized" as people would like you to think, and it's not nearly as free from manipulation as is claimed. The difference is that it's the privately owned Exchanges which get to make the rules, as opposed to governments.
What do you mean by that? Scrip has central authority which controls how is it issued, bitcoin has no such think. What rules did the exchanges make? I thought all the rules are given by the bitcoin protocol described in the original whitepaper: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. No private industry controls bitcoin.
Re:Fantastic news (Score:4, Interesting)
Bitcoins don't have an inherent value, they're just numbers. Gold has an inherent value because it can be used for stuff. Bitcoins don't.
If Bitcoin is meant to replace the US Dollar then the total value of all Bitcoins will have to equal the total value of all US Dollars.
There was approximately $1.24 trillion in circulation as of December 25, 2013.
There can be no more than 21 million bitcoins
This puts the value that a bitcoin should have at the time it totally replaces the US Dollar at: 59047.6 US Dollar.
Of course there are issues with this simplification, but it's a nice place to start.