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Dell Starts Accepting Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes: Mainstream retail companies have been slow to adopt Bitcoin, perhaps skeptical of its long-term value or unwilling to expend the effort required to put a payment system into place. Today, Bitcoin adoption got a momentum boost with Dell's announcement that it will accept Bitcoin as a payment method. Dell is by far the biggest company to start accepting Bitcoin. It's interesting to note that Dell, like many of the larger companies interacting with Bitcoin right now, is doing so through a third-party payment processor. On one hand, it's good — we don't necessarily want each company building their own implementation and possibly screwing it up. On the other hand, it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters.
The bitcoin community is highly technical. They will probably sell a lot of systems making it available as an option. They will convert their bitcoin to cash instantly minimizing currency risk.
Dell is using coinbase to convert the bitcoins to dollars, because no large business in their right mind would store any real assets in bitcoins.
If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best (real money converted to bitcoins, bitcoins converted back to real money).
....It needs to go through a middleman.
Employee Wages and benefits
Suppliers
Taxes
Real Estate
Utilities
Most all of these things need cash. And even if they could be paid in bitcoin most companies wouldn't want to do that infrastructure themselves and would outsource it.