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Microsoft Quietly Starts Accepting Bitcoin As Payment Method
An anonymous reader writes A new page in the help guide in the payment information of Microsoft's website reveals that the Redmond giant is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for products and services on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. Currently the payments must go through to credit a Microsoft Wallet account, and the service is initially only available to U.S. users. But the wording of the new page combines with an expansive year for Microsoft and a number of positive statements about Bitcoin from Bill Gates to indicate that this first step is more than just an experiment. Microsoft is now the largest commercial entity accepting the Bitcoin currency, which it processes via the BitPay system, thus protecting the company from fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin. Also at CNN Money.
I'm seriously starting to think that regular currency will be no more in the future. I should have started mining early though, you pretty much can't get bitcoins anymore without paying for them.
I find the emergence of bitcoin and other virtual currencies alarming. We have "free markets," that are governed by some type of ruling bodies be it the IMF or the Fed (not a government entity, for those that didn't know). However, the acceptance of an unregulated currency is strife with the ability for fraud and manipulation. However, as a stock trader (see my blog The Market is not Random), the emergence of these currencies that trade on pure technical patterns is something that must be embraced if it becomes publicly accepted.
I just hope it does not become publicly accepted. Can someone help convince me that bitcoin is the way to go?
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artlu.net
L2Read people.
They've signed on with bitpay.
That's not the same thing as "accepting bitcoin as payment". They're accepting good ol' Yankee Greenbacks as payment, and simply allowing a third party to convert binary monopoly money into US Dollars. The fact that they're doing it this way, and don't want to have even a single bitcoin themselves, shows exactly how averse they are to the whole scam.
This is just more libertarian fluff crap from people who don't understand currency or economics, just vomiting up stuff from the latest "end the fed" newsletter. Until there is a microsoft corporate bitcoin wallet that you can perform transactions on, they're not "accepting bitcoin as payment". Quit the hype.
With 3rd party services like BitPay, everyone can update their services/site to accept BitCoin with no additional risk, right? No real risk, yet, big political statement.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Steve Ballmer IS Satoshi Nakamoto!
The only statement here is that fools and their money are easily parted, and not quickly enough.
Microsoft has simply found another way to extract money from people who don't have ACTUAL money.
Nothing to see here, move along.
for the whole sodden sytem to be "cracked". Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out a way to ruin BItcoin trading. Because of this, cryptocurrencies are not to be trusted. Bitcoin and Dogecoin and the rest of these cryptocurrencies are popular with people who dislike regulation. Without regulation you have chaos, theft, cracking attempts, a system that can never be fully trusted.
This will be the wave of the future sites like www.stldiesel.com are the future of business online.
I read this as "microsoft quietly starts accepting blood as payment". Need morning blood coffee!
Is under the control of a Cartel, and then the possibility exists to 'fork' the bitchain and take over that other 40 percent of coins.
Go look at the pie charts of bitcoin mining. The potential is already there.
A way to ruin it besides the exchanges breaking themselves? Because the systems are borderline unusable as they are.
If you are late to the party, there really is no point in participating on the bitcoin speculatory game. It makes for great comedy though.
If you never have any Euros, you're not accepting them for payment.
You're allowing a third party, the bank, to do a conversion for you.
Microsoft almost certainly subcontracts the processing of credit cards to a third party merchant account or nexus. So they're subcontracting to a third party who specializes in converting bitcoins to dollars, and already has the infrastructure in place to do it. What's the difference?
Bitcoin 2.0 will be completely decentralized and you should be able to do direct exchanges with people without having to connect online.
The US dollar already bought New Zealand, THAT should scare you.
Fiat money is centrally regulated by groups of people, and are therefore easily manipulable (History is full of example, and recent quantative easing, etc are proof enough also).
Bitcoin is like gold: the total amount available is regulated by no one.
Note that "gold-standard" money (i.e. money convertible for a given amount of gold) is regulated by a group of people (the one that says the amount of gold), and is therefore easily manipulable as well. History showed us that too.
So, the way I understand it, bitcoin is as good as gold with the actual convenience factor of being digital.
> I just hope it does not become publicly accepted. Can someone help convince me that bitcoin is the way to go?
Modern money, like the US Dollar, is just how we keep track of who owes something to others, or is owed something. Mostly the tracking is via bank ledgers, but occasionally it is on paper (as in paper money). Almost every dollar in existence represents a debt, either treasury bonds, mortgages, or other bank loans. Dollars make the debt easily traded in convenient units.
Bitcoin also uses a ledger to keep track. It's a public distributed one, but rather than being based on debt, it's based on work. All the balances are positive. This discourages a government from spending money it doesn't have, and banks from leeching off the rest of us, earning money simply because they create debt, instead of actual work.
Central banks have shown time and time again that they are bad at managing their money supply. Venezuela and Russia are two current examples, but there are literally hundreds of examples through history. Bitcoin's supply is managed by a software algorithm that releases new units at a known rate. It is on automatic pilot rather than the whim of fallible humans. I trust that more.
> I don't believe that it is absolutely uncountefeitable. I did read the Wiki on it, but I don't think that any item digitally-based is safe. We are on /. after all ;)
Then you don't understand the central invention in bitcoin, an accounting ledger that is public and cannot be altered. In order to counterfeit some bitcoins, you would have insert a transaction into everyone's copy of the ledger, and also have a valid checksum (hash). Without it, every copy of the software will reject the data as invalid. The huge amount of specialized hardware thrown at generating valid hashes prevents anyone else from inserting a spurious one.
Here, Microsoft is smart enough to accept bitcoins, not stupid enough to keep them.
Haha, do you remember that time someone exploited a bug to make themselves 9 billion bitcoins, and they had to roll their entire worthless economy back a day to fix it?
Of course you don't, you blithering moron. No one in the bitcoin world knows anything about bitcoin.
Citation?
Straw man.
That's when the network was tiny and the software was new and unproven; it was fixed and undone without any real detriment.
Nothing like that has occurred since, even though the Bitcoin ecosystem is now worth billions of dollars and is thus a juicy target for attack. I mean, it's since been nearly half a decade of continuous operation in managing billions of dollars of assets!
It boggles the mind that you are not impressed.
The next worst case happened in March of 2013, when an update essentially made an inadvertent change to the protocol, causing an unplanned "hard fork" of the blockhain. Here's an article about it. It's a fascinating read; it certainly provides some insight into what a hard fork looks like: As is supposed to be the case, the network is defined by those who wield the most computation.
Bitcoin is solid. It is founded on the mathematics that define this universe, decades-old proven cryptography, and software that has been under more scrutiny than anything else in the history of computing.
As usual in every 'X Accepts Bitcoins!' post, Microsoft isn't touching BTC at all. They're taking real world money from BitPay, who are acting as a payment processor and currency exchange.
No company in their right mind will actually accept bitcoin, given the volatility, legal issues, and absolutely vast fraud that makes up the 'market'.