The Merchant Adoptocalypse
Most merchants who adopt Bitcoin do not keep the bitcoins they earn but instead sell them for dollars on exchanges immediately using payment processing services such as BitPay. Consequently, the merchant creates selling pressure at the exchange, which drives the price down. So far this effect has been relatively mild, but there is a real possibility that the “merchant adoption” effect could spiral out of control if the selling pressure from new merchants is so great as to induce other people to dump their bitcoins. Once this happens, the price of Bitcoin could drop to zero in minutes. This....
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A long time ago, in an economic environment far far away, the merchant controlled their own financial destiny — so they shall soon again.
On the tails of Bitcoin Black Friday, BitPay Inc. announced a new record of processing 55,288 of bitcoin merchant transactions in November. BitPay continues to sign on new merchants daily and most recently released a new merchant pricing model and merchant directory. Taking the lead in the payment processing space in the Bitcoin community, BitPay also brought on Virgin Galactic as a merchant to go as far as facilitate the acceptance of Bitcoin for flights to outer space! BitPay onboarded over 3,000 merchants and also worked with Shopify to integrate BitPay into its checkout process to....
San Francisco-based bitcoin broker and merchant services provider Coinbase announced on Thursday that they are now supporting the BIP:70 Bitcoin Payment Protocol. As provided by Coinbase, the following are features that make the Protocol useful: Human-readable, secure payment destinations- customers will be asked to authorize payment to a payment processor identified as "example.com" (or "Example, Inc." if an extended validation certificate is used) instead of an inscrutable, 34-character Bitcoin address. Secure proof of payment, which the customer can use in case of a dispute with the....
While it's safe to say that 2014 was a banner year for bitcoin in terms of merchant adoption - with the likes of Overstock, DISH, Dell and Microsoft entering the space - 2015 hasn't quite started with the same bang. Though rumors continue to swirl about a possible Uber or Airbnb entrance, the highest profile merchant to accept bitcoin this year has been a local subsidiary of global real estate franchise RE/MAX. Members of the bitcoin processing ecosystem seem divided on the state of this industry sector entering March. Those contacted by CoinDesk all agreed that, after months of grabbing....
Blockchain technology, the protocol that underlies Bitcoin, could one day change how consumer card payments are verified. A recent Bank of America Merchant Services report has touched upon the subject of Bitcoin as one of the disruptersin the payment processing ecosystem. Quite an interesting announcement, considering the plan is to expand Bank of America Merchant Services to Europe later this year. The primary goal for of any merchant services provider is to come up with new ways to make e-commerce more appealing to both consumer and business. This is one of the areas Bank of America....