Overstock.com – the American internet retailer with over a billion dollars per year [6] in sales – will accept Bitcoin starting in 2014.
As Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told [7] 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 [8]. And a bitcoin ATM in Vancouver, Canada did $1 million dollars [9] 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 [10] 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 [11].