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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.
Of course they are converting it, but if they have a supplier in China that will accept Bitcoin too and they want prefer using Bitcoin to save days and thousands of $ in processing fees. Have you ever done an international wire transfer? It's long and painful while Bitcoin is free and instant. Nobody expected the market to change at once, just like the email didn't remove all fax machines at once, but 1 at the time.
How do they forward the taxes owed to the IRS? Or is it just considered barter?
it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin
Fee-less? Like the charges that all the credit card processors levy? ...or do you mean hidden fees that are just passed on to the customer?
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.
Most anyone out of the country is already choosing not to purchase american built (or processed) equipment after the NSA scandals so it really doesn't matter now at this point does it?
I suspect it'll be a long time until it does.
US isn't seeing any of the benefits (yet) because it's a massive power that can borrow and print money willy-nilly, and the currency is mostly under control at the moment. But not all countries are like that. There are countries where something like Bitcoin can be a viable alternative to official currency, like Argentina. Bitcoin is flawed, but it guards against certain attacks that can be performed to a currency, in a way that is sometimes useful.
On the other hand, the way Dell accepts Bitcoin doesn't bear a lot of risk; a third-party accepts Bitcoin for them and pay them in cash, and absorbs fluctuation risk in return for some fees. It relies on customers bearing the risks themselves. It isn't a big step for Bitcoin; it is only a very small step towards forming a sufficient number of nodes of a skeleton that may or may not turn into an actual ecosystem that eventually circulates Bitcoin. But isn't a terrible decision for Dell either.
Because, as is made clear in the summary, Dell does not accept BitCoin, they only accept USD.
A third-party payment processor gives Dell USD on your behalf, the same sort of USD Dell gets when their payment processor accepts a credit card.
they're accepting GE stock because I can sell stock to a third party and use the money to buy a Dell product. Makes for a good headline though.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How much is that computer? Three billion Doge!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I wish people would stop using the term untraceable when talking about those crypto-currencies, because the blockchain will forever hold every single transaction it has ever processed. It's the complete opposite of untraceable.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters.
This is a dumb complaint. Even if you think Bitcoin is great, there's no way it's going to do away with financial middlemen and transaction fees. Those things exist for too many different reasons. And even the fees it will eventually do away with, there would have to be some intermediate state between now and then, where businesses rely on some other business to deal with the processing of Bitcoin transactions, since Bitcoin hasn't become accepted as real currency yet.
Oh yes, I know, I'm going to get a whole speech about how Bitcoin is just as real as the US dollar because fiat currency is all made up and imaginary and all prices are set by the market and bla bla bla. I'm not claiming that Bitcoin isn't worth anything, but just that it hasn't been accepted as currency yet. If I can pay my bills or buy something with Bitcoin, it's the exception and not the rule. Plus, the value of Bitcoin is still very volatile. In practical terms, buying Bitcoins is more comparable to a speculative stock investment than it is to converting money into another currency.
So the reality of what's happening is, due to some level or customer demand, or maybe because they got a no-lose deal from their bitcoin processor, or perhaps it's just a publicity stunt, Dell has decided to accept a volatile stock as payment. Whatever you pay in Bitcoin immediately gets turned into dollars-- so Dell is really still working with dollars, but they've allowed a bitcoin payment processor to work as an intermediary to convert to the transaction into dollars.
It's a neat development, but you can't expect Dell to operate on Bitcoins at this point.
Are they loading Windows on it? Then it probably doesn't matter.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
- except for the "no inflation"
I don't think anyone can claim that bitcoin cannot have inflation. It has hyperinflation and hyperdeflation in pretty frequent intervals.
They can claim that the inflation/deflation is not within the reach of government manipulation, but it definitely does happen in very chaotic unpredictable ways. One's tinfoil hat has to be on very tight to see that as an improvement.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well said. There was the same kind of negativity back in the 90's when the internet as a whole was taking off. The ones who missed out gradually turn from whining to reluctantly adopting, then it went mainstream like it was perfectly natural from the get-go.
The same will happen with digital currency. The mentality is not unlike the stock market. The ones who whine the most are the ones who didn't expend the effort to understand stuff early and therefore missed out. It's happened before and will happen again, there's a perfect example right here in this thread.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Thanks. It is wierd watching it happen, though. One would think that people would start giving it the benefit of the doubt, though. I am surprised at how strenuous the naysayers are and how much they seem to lack even basic technical curiousity about this new technology.
You are correct, though. Perhaps it is just wierd because this particular technology moves much faster than many, and its very nature is an affront to certain well-cherished white elephants.
I don't think anyone can claim that bitcoin cannot have inflation. It has hyperinflation and hyperdeflation in pretty frequent intervals.
Bitcoin has an extremely predictable rate of supply inflation (the kind meant here) which follows an exponential decay curve and will be under 1%/yr. by 2020 or so. There could be some very minor supply deflation after that point due to people losing their keys, but it should never become a major factor.
The price inflation and deflation you allude to is partly due to being a very young high-risk/high-reward venture. If Bitcoin is to reach even a fraction of its potential as a currency, the price per bitcoin must end up several orders of magnitude higher than it is now to match the increased demand, or there simply wouldn't be enough to go around. On the other hand, concerted political opposition could render it useless in most of the major markets. Whether the innovators or the politicians will win in the long run is anyone's guess at this point, thus the risk.
The other part, which is likely to dominate in the long-term if Bitcoin succeeds, is a reflection of normal changes in the demand for money. Central banks usually try to dampen out demand-driven price swings by manipulating the supply of money, but they are in fact an essential part of balancing present and future demand for goods, and suppressing them leads to an economy-wide misallocation of resources.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You pay taxes in US Dollars in the US. You need to convert anything to that. Like if you sold a bunch of goods to someone in Europe and got paid in euros. No problem, and you can keep some of that in Euros if you like, but you need to sell some of those Euros to a bank (or other entity) and get dollars to pay the IRS. They only take dollars.
If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best
"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services. So I guess dollars will never catch on either.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well. However trading assets has a capital gain/loss tax implication in the U.S.
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 that you held them and 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.
So if you buy a laptop from Dell and the IRS discovers you paid in bitcoins you may be expected to provide some sort of accounting for the coins used, date acquired, value on that date, etc.
This is so not true. Think of all the benefits Bitcoin has to offer for normal people, most of which use Bitcoin to do normal things:
- easy and near immediate international money transfers (I am thinking of e.g. my parents sending me money for college, or
the other way around when I am hopefully able to pay back)
- virtually free international money transfers (I recommend anyone to try to do this with BoA or Western union and then try with Bitcoin -- there is no coming back...)
- No risk of identity theft on online purchases (this is big!!! When you use bitcoin for online purchases, no one stores yuor credit card information or other identity details that could be stolen). Sure -- banks mostly protect you in case your CC gets stolen, and voids the fraudulent purchases -- but ultimately they still make us pay for this in form of higher fees etc.
- When buying from local stores, no middle man (eg. Visa, Mastercard, AMEX...) gets 1-5% of your payment as a transaction costs. I like supporting my local businesses and this way (if they accept Bitcoin) I am able to let them earn this much more on my (small) purchases -- without paying a dime more.
- Think of third world countries with unstable currencies, and little or no banking infrastructure. Yet many of them have smartphone coverage and most people have smartphones. Bitcoin in this kind of places is amazing technology that brings next generation banking to people that never before had any possibility to have bank account.
And there must be many more. These are just on top of my list! The notion that Bitcoin is somehow coin of crime etc. shady method of payment is no different than when at the late 1990's web was laughed and ridiculed at as a mediums of commerce. I would suspect that 10 years from now -- we look back and say that how could we ever have imagined a world without bitcoin.
Just my cents...
Just my cents...
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well.
Where is the strawman you are arguing against that said the word "only"?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Bullshit. I was talking about adopting critical mass by the general population, not wall street.
In 95 when Netscape was climbing there was nothing but negativity. The media was saturated with stuff like what's the internet good for, the stock price is absurd, browsers are clunky and crash all the time, any search engine was limited to a small set of sites (rings), usenet is a haven for porn/bins, I'd never trust putting my credit card in a browser. Probably another 10 things on top of that.
Even Ebay was surrounded with extreme negativity when it IPOed in late '98. Why would anyone want to pay for someone else's junk and pay shipping to boot? Amazon was criticized as never being able to compete against bricks and mortar, why pay for a book to be shipped when I can go to the mall and buy it now?
The negativity among the general population slowly waned during 98-99 when the infrastructure was built out enough for people to realize that really useful stuff could be done on the internet. That was the point of the analogy in my original post.
I save upwards of 15 % on weekly groceries. That's fairly significant just by itself.
Also, when buying from reputable vendors, it is very nice not to have to worry about credit card information being stolen.
It is also super easy to send money to my brother, just through a Skype call, directly to his phone.
Plus when I hold bitcoin I can be certain that my bank isn't going to suddenly start charging a maintenance fee on it.
If Bitcoin isn't for you, that is completely OK. There is plenty of room in the world for Luddites. For the rest of us, it is the beginning of a fairer, more equitable and just financial system, one in which we participate as equals.
"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well.
Where is the straw man you are arguing against that said the word "only"?
Currency is not **the** middleman, it is **a** middleman.
I'm not arguing against bitcoins. I'm pointing out that it is an asset in various legal jurisdictions and that this has huge implications that are only now coming to light.
You totally missed the point of my post.
I don't know why you got hung up on the word "the", when the point was to refute the assertion that a middleman is worthless. I never said it was a currency middleman or an asset middleman... and I don't disagree with your analysis... but that makes no difference to my argument.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I have some bitcoins, and I don't find myself in any of the 4 categories. I just think bitcoins are a worthwhile addition to the numerous existing ways to store and transfer value. It has some advantages and some disadvantages, but there are enough different applications in the world that it will find its niche where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Just my cents...
Just my cents...
Bitcents or Dollar cents? There's potentially a $6.28 difference there.
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No one likes to admit they're wrong, and the more strongly you've committed to a position, the stupider you'll feel when the evidence becomes undeniable. That's why, at some point, it always stops being about issues and starts being about persons: people are not defending their position anymore, they're defending themselves. It's one of the more annoying failure modes of human intellect.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Breath buddy
And after you have taken that breath. Breathe. :-P
If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it's still moving, nationalize it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Casteism