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WordPress To Accept Bitcoins
angry tapir writes "WordPress has said it will accept payment in bitcoins, opening up the blogging platform to payments from users in countries not supported by PayPal or credit card companies. WordPress is free, open-source software, but the company Automattic offers paid-for features such as blog designs, custom domains, hosting partnerships and anti-spam measures."
So?
Cast your mind back 12 years to what slashdot and similar communities were like when Linux was just beginning to be taken seriously.
"Linux will never mainstream until it does X"
Very similar to how bitcoin will never be mainstream until it's accepted by X. And of course in the mean time big companies like Sun (who?) Silicon Graphics (who?), Digital (who?) and MS of course all ignored it. In some cases it did X. In some cases it didn't. Nevertheless, it ended up as about the #1 operating system in the world. I doubt there's anything in wider use overall out there.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The US dollar cannot succeed due to the violently idiotic community that has built itself around it.
From common con artists (Goldman Sachs, Enron) to large scale scale money laundering (Bank of America) the community is full of petty criminals.
Accepting USD is a mistake.
The people paying in dollars are all fucking crooks.
They're using BitPay. Assuming BitPay's charges are reasonable, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer.
Wordpress makes some simple API calls to BitPay. If someone pays in BitCoin, BitPay converts it to dollars, takes a processing fee, and adds it to Wordpress's balance. Wordpress can treat it as dollars from that point on, so tricky tax/accounting issues.
On that basis, why would you *not* accept BitCoin, if you think there are customers keen to spend them?
BitPay has to deal with tax/accounting/legality issues, but that's their business.
Money laundering now seems to mean not paying the bank their 6%. I shift a lot of money around the world through some very questionable countries but as long as I pay the bank, no one minds. If I take a lot of cash onto a plane to avoid the bank fees I am a money launderer. It is BS and I no longer take it seriously, to me it is a challenge. I am not a criminal but I will do all I can to avoid paying stupid banks in other countries money that they do not deserve.
Does anyone understand how real money laundering works? It is easy and it does not have to move countries. Just get a shop and sell stuff. If you want to clean some money you sell more on paper than you really sold. It is that easy. You do not need to go to another country with a suitcase of cash, that is stupid.
I really want Bitcoin to become a reality because then I can save 6%. Now the people I work with all want Swift payments or Moneygram. I try to avoid Paypal and Western Union as they charge way too much.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
If you go to Room 77 in Berlin you can buy burgers and beer with Bitcoins. You pay with your mobile phone. I've done it, it's easy. The guy who runs Room 77 is a huge Bitcoin fan and recently announced that 4 more shops in Berlin are now accepting Bitcoins too.
Is HSBC present in the countries you're operating? If you set up an HSBC Premier account in any of the countries it operates, you're automatically eligible to open HSBC Premier accounts in any of the countries it operates - without paying any fees. Then you can use GlobalView to log in in all the accounts at the same time and shift money without paying any fees.
I think "Linux on the desktop" is an interesting analogy for Bitcoin, but it's not the only one available. If Bitcoin follows the trajectory of desktop Linux then it will grow and grow until it saturates its niche market, at which point usage will level off. Unable to tackle the challenges needed to advance to the next level, it will become something of a calling card for certain communities but will just be a curiosity to the rest of the world. The underlying ideas or philosophies, though, may have influence out of proportion to its usage (eg, Android being open source was certainly heavily influenced by Googles experiences with Linux).
That's one scenario. Another is that rather than being similar to desktop Linux, Bitcoin is more similar to the web. Bitcoin is about 3 years old, but really it's only more like 2 years old because for the first year it languished in absolute obscurity. If you think back to the internet in the early to late 90s, the net was this technically complicated and intimidating beast. You needed a crazy thing called Trumpet WinSock, and then you needed an ISP (only a few small ones existed) and then you needed even more software and often it just wouldn't work at all, and when it did there was no friendly start page or anything, you just had to know where to go. The de-facto standard for "normal people" was CompuServe and AOL. Movie trailers had AOL keywords at the end, not web addresses.
Despite that the web eventually triumphed and became the standard, replacing the sophisticated and well organized corporations that previously reigned supreme. Why? Well, it was an open and international system where everyone could take part. The protocols were documented, anyone could write software for it. Because it was open that's where the research was taking place. Then the existing institutions started to provide limited forms of web access alongside their walled gardens, lending it legitimacy. It's easy to forget that back then the net was frequently painted as swamped with immoral, degenerate or even illegal activity. In 1995 TIME Magazine ran with a cover story claiming the internet was completely dominated by porn, based on statistics about USENET that later turned out to be completely bogus. Parallels with some contemporary stories around Bitcoin are easy to see.
Anyway, there's no guarantees of success and either scenario is equally likely, IMHO (in the absence of a dystopian crackdown by governments that simply ban any financial system they cannot exert total control over).
you do realize that bitcoin is mostly used by criminals for illegal transactions and by people who want to avoid income tax
And you know this.. how?
It is certainly used by criminals - like any other currency - but "mostly" is just baseless speculation.
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