Mm. The companies might have fallen from their high, but they're hardly irrelevant or dead. Overstock is advertised like crazy and has some pretty good deals to boot, Tiger competes directly with Newegg. App is a bit of an outlier there..
Starbucks or Apple? I'd assume the megacorps will take it up once the instability gets smoothed out a bit. Which is a problem of adoption, which means the faster the smaller fish like these adopt it, the faster the bigger ones will.
I predict Amazon will take BTC within the next 2-3 years.
> I'd assume the megacorps will take it up once the instability gets smoothed out a bit.
Why would they care if they get paid through bitpay or coinbase in USD anyway? It doesn't actually matter the current exchange rate for btc because they get the same USD anyway.
Someone has to handle that transaction - like Coinbase.
Part of their risk is that Coinbase, still an early stage company, isn't reliable enough to process their volume. They could have issues with how they process transactions, all kinds of things could come up.
Part of it is being risk-averse to BTC itself, part is being risk-averse to early stage payment gateways.
If it were me, it would be because the visual prices fluctuate on the site. If you put some stuff in your cart, wait a day, and find out the price went up by the equivalent of $100, it doesn't make the retailer look good.
I've typically bought computer stuff from Tiger Direct. About half of my computer parts have came from there for about the last 10 years or so. They aren't the absolute cheapest site online, but I've never had any problem with returns or customer service with them, so I keep with them.
Is that the next talking point for the Bitcoin opponents/skeptics? I guess once "no retailers accept Bitcoin" dried up, it's no surprise they found a new one.
I'm aware the choice was deliberate. That still doesn't make it any better of a system.
And of course proponents like the idea; they're already invested in Bitcoin. The more new people who use it, the greater value proponents' existing stockpiles will have.
Not really. "Ooh look, Bitcoin is deflationary, let's invest" → invest → "Hey everyone, come use this great Bitcoin thing!" is a logical chain of action.
Problem is that we've had deflationary currencies, and they were terrible. People will soon find out how easy it is to manipulate a currency with limited supply.
> People will soon find out how easy it is to manipulate a currency with limited supply.
As opposed to inflationary government currencies, the entire point of which is to be endlessly manipulated by a central authority? I don't think the track record of those is anything to be proud of.
Then you don't remember the gold panics. The stability of inflation of inflationary government currencies over the last few decades is nothing short of astonishing.
They are actually a tad bit easier to deal with than Newegg for purchase orders. They also have a pretty good group in customer service. We order a lot from them and cdwg.
Google does a lot of things which it then happily drops. Google doing a thing is not really a reliable indicator of what Google thinks of it - the company as a whole is very freeform in its ideas process.
It's a start. You don't go from a tiny handful of sites started by Bitcoin enthusiasts to being accepted on Apple.com and in Starbucks retail locations in a day. A year or so ago, we were pretty much at the tiny handful of sites stage. We're starting to get some fairly second-rate internet retailers now, who have no reason to be interested in Bitcoin aside from pure business potential. It's a good step. Widespread adoption of something so unprecedented, poorly-understood, and potentially disruptive isn't going to happen overnight.
We had Overstock, who has fallen from its high. We had App.net, who is struggling to be relevant. now TigerDirect.
When is Starbucks or Apple going to accept Bitcoin?