The Best Real-World Bitcoin Merchant Pioneers of This Year
Amid all the excitement and speculation surrounding bitcoin's price over the last couple of months, it's important to remember: to be worth anything at all, bitcoin must be accepted by merchants and used by regular customers on a day-to-day basis. Several online businesses accept bitcoin as a fast and simple, fee-free way to transact, but there have been a few more hurdles in introducing the currency to physical traders. There are payment processor accounts to set up, landlords and suppliers who accept only fiat currencies, and the odd pieces of clunky point-of-sale software and hardware.....
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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....