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Giant US Retailer to Accept Bitcoin
Overstock.com – the American internet retailer with over a billion dollars per year in sales – will accept Bitcoin starting in 2014.
As Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told the Financial Times:
I think a healthy monetary system at the end of the day isn’t an upside down pyramid based on the whim of a government official, but is based on something that they can’t control.
If there’s going to be some part of the population which adopts it… I think that we’ll get that business. And the people who switch to it will respect that we started adopting it.
Europe has rolled out its first Bitcoin ATM. And a bitcoin ATM in Vancouver, Canada did $1 million dollars worth of transactions within the first 29 days.
Mobile gift card company Gyft – which allows users to purchase gift cards at more than 50,000 retail locations in the U.S., including Brookstone, Lowe’s, GAP, Sephora, Gamestop, American Eagle, Nike, Marriott, Burger King and Fandango – partnered with BitPay earlier this year to start accepting bitcoins within its app.
According to the Bank of England’s Chief of Financial Stability, this may be a big step towards breaking up the monopoly of the too big to fail banks.
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+ 1 for the Interterminal Star Trek ref. What a tangled (Tholian) web we weaved ...
Time to go implode.
"Exponential Growth leads to exponential collapse. And with the continuation of Bitcoin as it is currently structured...that will be the fate of Bitcoin."
The growth of the blockchain does lead to serious problems.
If I understand correctly, when someone half way around the world buys a package of gum, that transaction is stored in the blockchain, and the information is propagated to everyone else on the network. Potentially billions of people now have to store forever the gum purchase.
So the info concerning the guy who bought the famous pizza some years ago is still stored in the blockchain, and will be there forever apparently.
Why would I care about this transaction? Why do I need to store it?
This is very different, and exponentially less efficient, than any previous form of money, or credit, or business contract, where usually only two parties need to store the information, and in some cases a few more such as a bank or govt. agency. The advantage of cold cash or gold coin is that no one needs to record the transaction: once it's done, it's done.
Decentralization -- Bitcoiners trust nobody. Especially centralized third parties claiming to keep track of all transactions and risk being shutdown. If I receive a bitcoin as a payment, I am not going to trust some third party to tell me the bitcoin has not been counterfeited. I need the full and open ledger to ensure the trail of transactions leads back to a properly minted bitcoin.
No counterfeits and no double spends are more important to me as a seller of goods and services than gigabytes on a hard drive.
Ok, you have officially blown your cover and revealed to the world your shill ways.
p.s. you can't "pimp" something you're giving away for free.