Belgian Telecom Becomes First To Accept Bitcoin

An anonymous reader writes "Belgian telecom Mobile Vikings announced this week that it will begin accepting payment in BitCoin. Combined with mobile wallet apps, the service promises to revolutionize point of sale technologies. Could this be the tipping point for both BitCoin and payment by mobile phone?"

Comments

Tipping point

[OptimalCynic]

Could this be the tipping point for both BitCoin and payment by mobile phone?"

No. Hopefully this particular hopeful news article questioning doesn't last as long as the "Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?" one.

Too unstable

[mark-t]

You can't generally set a value for something of worth in bitcoin, because its value changes too much... sometimes even from one day to the next. The only way to manage it at all is to always deal in x dollars worth of bitcoin, in which case the dollar is still the currency being used.

Re:Too unstable

[TheRealMindChild]

x currency worth of bitcoins. There are other countries out there with their own currencies

Re:Too unstable

[De Lemming]

Like almost all online merchants who accept Bitcoin, they set their price in euros or dollars and the price in BTC is calculated at the moment of sale. Mobile Vikings uses BitPay as a payment processor who offers this service, another one is Coinbase.

Re:Too unstable

[mark-t]

Fair enough... I apologize profusely for my lack of global inclusion.

Re:Too unstable

[vinehair]

This kind of service doesn't help at all with future planning of finances, as would what you'd expect with a mobile phone plan. Sure, these services help with the immediate case, but if I have a recurring payment of $20, say, every month, what good is that to me if XBT have just tanked yet again and I have less than half in my wallet than I had planned for? The stability is the biggest (one of the only?) problems left with bitcoin to solve before it could see wider use, and this right now is just a novelty way to pay the odd bill or two for a slim margin of customers, from a company that has made its name with similar novel marketing tactics.

Re:Too unstable

[mark-t]

If $1000 was $5t when the bubble pops, $5 would be 2.5 cents. Although $5 might not seem like a lot to lose, multiply that times the total number of transactions issued before the bubble bursts, and you could be talking about thousands of dollars instead of just five bucks.

Re:Too unstable

[Em Adespoton]

This kind of service doesn't help at all with future planning of finances, as would what you'd expect with a mobile phone plan. Sure, these services help with the immediate case, but if I have a recurring payment of $20, say, every month, what good is that to me if XBT have just tanked yet again and I have less than half in my wallet than I had planned for?

The stability is the biggest (one of the only?) problems left with bitcoin to solve before it could see wider use, and this right now is just a novelty way to pay the odd bill or two for a slim margin of customers, from a company that has made its name with similar novel marketing tactics.

Indeed... now people in Belgium can pretend they're living in Venezuela, where people pay in bolivars indexed against the item's value in USD.

Re: Too unstable

[easyTree]

I saw a snippet of a documentary on TV years ago (before I removed it from the house) which revealed that a survey had highlighted that fifty percent of Americans don't know that there *are* other countries!

Mobile Vikings customer

[De Lemming]

I'm a happy Mobile Vikings customer for almost two years now, and I applaud their move to accept Bitcoin. I will be using this option from now on.

Mobile Vikings are a small, tech oriented operator. Like several small operators in Belgium they use the cell tower network of one of the 3 big operators. MV were the first in Belgium to offer a decent plan for mobile data usage, a 15 € per month prepaid formula with 2 GB data included, while other operators where still billing (a lot) per MB used. When a lot of customers switched, this forced the big operators to offer similar plans (although they still cost more).

They're taking it at the exchange rate.

[bstarrfield]

I.E. They're accepting BitCoins as a commodity, not a currency via real time exchange rate, and I wonder who pays the transaction costs for the currency exchange.

BitCoin's wild fluctuations - a result of little to no liquidity, and half of all BitCoins in circulation being owned by less than a 1,000 people - make it impractical or downright foolish to post fixed prices.

"Belgian Telecom" is other company than "Vikings"

[Moskit]

Belgian Telecom is one company.
Mobile Vikings is another company.

Title is confusing, editors did not do a proper job there.