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Expedia To Accept Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes With the debacle of Mt. GoX, Bitcoin's future was looking a little murky. But in a significant mainline acceptance, Expedia has said they will begin accepting Bitcoins as a form of payment. At first, they will accept it for hotel bookings only, will accept it only in USA, and also will not be holding Bitcoins for any length of time — converting it to dollars as soon as they can. But, quoting Emily Spaven, managing editor of Bitcoin news site CoinDesk, as told to the BBC, the move was "brilliant news" and it "brings digital currency further into the consciousness of the mainstream." So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
Unfortunately, American regulatory practices mean that for the foreseeable future, businesses will convert Bitcoin to cash as soon as they get it, and deposit it into ordinary bank accounts. As long as that goes on, Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
bitcoin has to much fluctuation for them to hold it. and do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall and or be told you can only get a room at the walk up / Max rack rate that can be sat 3-5 times the Expedia rate.
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
bitcoin has to much fluctuation for them to hold it. and do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall and or be told you can only get a room at the walk up / Max rack rate that can be sat 3-5 times the Expedia rate.
You would never "show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more". Normally I would just call you an idiot. But it is not your fault. The Mainstream Media has done you a disservice. When you pay a merchant with Bitcoin they can choose to have it INSTANTLY converted to cash or save a portion of the Bitcoin payment. There is no "fluctuation risk" for the merchant unless they choose to hold Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, American regulatory practices mean that for the foreseeable future, businesses will convert Bitcoin to cash as soon as they get it, and deposit it into ordinary bank accounts. As long as that goes on, Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
Its not American regulatory practices, i.e. the recent IRS advisory about virtual currency being an asset not a currency. It is, and has been since before the IRS spoke, bitcoins volatility that causes merchants not to **hold** bitcoins.
Also, merchants don't have to convert bitcoins to fiat currency. They may never even touch or see a bitcoin. Various bitcoin exchanges have merchant services where the merchant tells the exchange the price in fiat currency and the exchange calculate the equivalent number of bitcoins to display to the customer, provides an exchange payment address, and when bitcoins are received at this address the exchange credits the merchant's account the exact fiat currency amount they originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations. The merchant does all its pricing and accounting in fiat currency and receives the exact correct payment in fiat currency. It merely receives the payment from a 3rd party, the exchange rather than directly from the customer.
Again, all of this was in place **before** the IRS advisory. It was due to bit coin's price volatility, which continues today. This week bitcoin lost 11.6% of its value. Bitcoin acts much like an asset, i.e. gold, stocks, etc.
That said, bitcoin is an excellent payment system. It will probably replace paypal and such, put a dent in credit cards, but probably not compete with the US Dollar, the Euro, etc to a large degree. Bitcoin has to become a stable store of value before it can become a serious currency.
And of course if you are a speculator bitcoins have a value there too.
So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
For Christ's sake, stop hijacking the story and trying to show off your cleverness, especially if your snarky comment could've been written better by a ten-year old. A slow ten-year old at that.
The editor comments are generated by algorithms. The site beta tests algorithms for future Turing tests. :-)
People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
Perhaps they are reporting the numbers, but most of the numbers are "poor"?
The "carrot" has always been "we can use this as currency for purchasing goods!" but the reality has always been that Bitcoin is in reality a speculative commodity that is rarely used in commerce.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's my suspicion, yes. The few numbers I've seen reported more or less boil down to "we implemented Bitcoin [purchasing | donations] and got like, $27.95 total from that route over six months". If there are stories of companies implementing a Bitcoin payment route and doing significant volume through it, I haven't been able to find them. Well, at least if you're looking at companies selling legal things.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
To be honest most of the large merchants/service providers announcing that they accept Bitcoins never actually see a bitcoin. They contract merchant services where a bitcoin exchange acts as an intermediary that converts the price to bitcoins, accepts bitcoins and then pays the merchant in the currency the original price was stated in. And they pay the exact amount originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations.
All accepting bitcoins means for most of these merchants is that they work with a different payment processor, say Coinbase rather than VISA. The merchant still prices, receives payments and does all their accounting in dollars, euros, etc.
WTF is a "Bitcoiin" anyway?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
What a coincidence, I'm also looking for donations for my currently-unknown project!
BTC wallet 17Yvsma9tfiuqVP7QhsFE2VmsFpTEMy17P
My company routinely has customers pay in Bitcoins and I've stopped converting them to USD as there are plenty of avenues to spend them. I can also tell you at least one free software distribution has seen a substantial donation from Bitcoins because we've been contributing in Bitcoins. And that is not substantial relative to our companies size it is a substantial part of the distribution's income.
WTF is a "Bitcoiin" anyway?
A bitcoin is an entry in a financial ledger. A ledger that is open and transparent and verified by multiple independent (hopefully) parties.
A bitcoin wallet that a particular person may posses never contains any bitcoins. What it does contain is the digital signature that allows bitcoins associated with a particular account in the ledger to be transferred to another account.
"American regulatory practices"
Such as...?
A recent IRS advisory said virtual currency is to be treated as an assent not a currency. So lets say you receive some bitcoins. At some future date you spend these bitcoins. Since these bitcoins are an asset you have to account for their gain or loss in value for the days you held them an declare a loss or gain on your taxes. In short spending bitcoins has the paperwork overhead of selling stocks, its not like spending dollars at all.
Ex. You buy one coin at $500 and another at $600. Coins are priced at $800 at the time of a future purchase. You buy something for $1,200, 1.5 coins. Using FIFO (first in first out) your basis for the outgoing 1.5 coins is $500 + $300 = $800, and the basis for the returning 0.5 coins is still $300. You experienced a gain of $400 on the 1.5 coins at the time of the sale and that $400 would seem to be taxable income. Apologies if I botched the math, hopefully the point gets across.
Porn.com does 10% of their revenue in Bitcoin. The industries that are doing the highest sales volume in bitcoin are ones where a) consumers value privacy and b) credit cards are raping merchants for double digit percentages because they are "high risk".
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-10-percent-porn-com-sales/
Well you are doing a disservice to Slashdotters by poking holes in their mindless dribble. Just let them be and allow them to wallow in their fantasy worlds, they're happier there!
Thanks for the response. The asset vs. currency advisory is a relevant point and I admit that I missed it.
Cool story bro, feel free to post a link to your company with an official announcement of this.
Yup, they do not accept Euros either. They convert your Euros into US dollars, which they accept.
As popularity grows, so will fees.
But as the market grows, volatility decreases, which makes it possible to deal directly in Bitcoin.
That will not eliminate fees. The Bitcoin model will eventually require increased fees on each and every transaction. As mining becomes more difficult and less rewarding, miners need an incentive other than solving blocks. That will be the fees embedded in each transaction.
Keep in mind that miners do not only create new coins. They also verify the transactions in the block chain and get the embedded fees. Without a large number of independent miners this block chain can be corrupted and individual transactions listed can no longer be trusted to be accurate. To keep a large number of independent miners involved they have to be rewarded. Today mining new coins is the main reward, some day it will not be and the fees embedded in transactions will have to provide the necessary reward.
If you don't like living under the opressive hand of government, you could move to the Central African Republic, where they don't have that problem.
1. "bitcoin has too much fluctuation for them to hold it" - correct
2. Do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall - What shortfall? See #1.
They have no intrinsic value, similar to tulip bulbs back in the day. Gold has intrinsic value. Currency has intrinsic value in that it's tied to the GDP and ability of its issuer to pay bonds. It's true monetary policy can grow or shrink a money supply, but see above. When a bitcoin is generated, it was generated from not virtually nothing, but literally nothing.
Assuming the merchant instantly converts Bitcoins into cash for say, a $100 equivalent transaction, what is the difference in transaction cost when compared with a credit card? I know credit card transactions cost roughly 2%, or $2 in this case.
Assuming the merchant instantly converts Bitcoins into cash for say, a $100 equivalent transaction, what is the difference in transaction cost when compared with a credit card? I know credit card transactions cost roughly 2%, or $2 in this case.
It depends on the merchant's Bitcoin processor or whatever private contract they have with them. The main processors are Coinbase and BitPay. There is a transaction fee paid by the customer of .0001 BTC when they make the payment. That fee goes to the Bitcoin miners on the network. The payment processors have varying fees for the transaction that the merchant would pay when instantly converting to cash. I believe there is no fee on the portion of Bitcoin the merchant may or may not choose to hold. For the moment at least.
PRINT "Signature line broken."
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0.0001 BTC is 5 cents in today's market (1 BTC = $568) which is quite cheap for a transaction. Suppose the buyer also does not want the risk of BTC fluctuations, so he purchases BTC just before buying from the online store. But the cost to convert USD to $100 worth of BTC and then reconverting the BTC to USD seems both inefficient and expensive because there is usually a spread (or difference in buying and selling prices of a commodity). So after all the fees and conversions, the buyer may have spend $101 or $103 for transaction, which is not much cheaper than a credit card transaction.
What is a bitcoin? It's an entry in a shared block chain (list of transactions) which requires computing a very difficult hash function to verify. That computation is called a "proof of work." The computer that successfully verifies a block also gets an entry in the ledger giving it a reward for calculating the hash. You can't arbitrarily create a bitcoin precisely because everyone on the network has the same shared block chain. All of this requires a lot of computational cycles and hence electrical power. So in a fashion you're translating electrical power into currency.
That's true, but they can still collect stats on payment methods, which is pretty routine. What I'm curious about is whether switching to a payment processor that accepts Bitcoin results in anyone actually buying things with Bitcoin. Is it more like adding support for EUR, or more like adding support for the Kazakhstani tenge?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not everyone lives in America... at last count, most of the world does not live there. For those people who live in Singapore, the tax treatment is equally clear and much better. IE. The tax applicable to this scenario is zero. Other jurisdictions are different again.
So although the US economy represents a huge part of the 'on-the-grid' world economy, it is nowhere near all of the story. Add to that, the system-D economy (off-grid) and the IRS is mostly irrelevant to a system like Bitcoin.
expedia and others converting bits to real money asap is simply because THEY HAVE BILLS TO PAY TOO, and in real money.. like paying for the stuff their customers just paid in bits for. expedia may accept bitcoins, but hilton, american airlines, and hertz, do not.
american regulations and rulings have absolutely nothing to do with it.
"am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business"
Silk Road? :>
Expedia is using something like Bitpay for their Bitcoin processing, right? If that's the case, they get their payment in cash right away and do not need to worry about any price fluctuations.
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/...
With the debacle of Mt. GoX, Bitcoin's future was looking a little murky
Not to anyone who actually follows Bitcoin. MtGox was old news in 2013, a year before it actually failed. Bit coin's success was never based on MtGox - it was the other way around. And the failure of a fraudulent company in the Bitcoin space made Bitcoin stronger, not weaker.
Tired of hearing this illogical assertion repeated.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Why would you bother looking for that? Who cares if people's businesses run mostly on BitCoin? Isn't the interesting bit that users can pay with BitCoin, not that businesses run largely on it?
Not everyone lives in America...
Did the original question ""American regulatory practices" Such as...?" confuse you?
The TSA does a whole lot of pre-flight data mining on passenger lists. I recall some discussion a while back about how they included included things like the credit card numbers, billing addresses etc in the mix.
Paying with Bitcoin has the same problem as paying with straight-up cash - it sets of all sorts of red flags because there's no real way to see if you're "connected" to other "interesting" people or not. No data = guilty until proven innocent etc.
When you're on the clock for getting to your departing flight, you really don't want to be on the wrong side of the extra special friendly pat-downs reserved for special troublemakers.
People like Expedia won't be wanting to mess with this can of worms for now, so they'll keep their bitcoin experiments a nice safe distance from the US Federal Government universe.
Normally I would just call you an idiot. But it is not your fault. The Mainstream Media has done you a disservice.
You're supposed to call them the "Lamestream Media", Glenn. Didn't you get Sarah's memo?
My company routinely has customers pay in Bitcoins and I've stopped converting them to USD as there are plenty of avenues to spend them...
What's your spot price for a kilo?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't know why, but I have a felling that Bitcoin is nothing more than a piramid scheme...
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian Pobble bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!