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Dell Starts Accepting Bitcoin

Posted by Soulskill on from the strength-in-numbers dept.

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.

4 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense by hodet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Makes sense by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      I know a lot of highly technical people, and I don't know a single person that owns a single bitcoin... so I question your conclusions. I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.

  2. Until dell can pay it's bills with Bitcoin.... by Isca · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ....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.

  3. Untraceable by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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