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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
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.
No, they are not accepting greenbacks, nor do most vendors. They accept 1s and 0s, which we all pretend are the same as actual physical greenbacks.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Steve Ballmer IS Satoshi Nakamoto!
And with "physical" you are referring to little pieces of paper with green ink stamped on them ?
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.
I like crypto currencies like Dogecoin because it allows websites and games to trade in fractions of cents, which would be impossible with standard payment methods that charge cents in trading fees.
As an example, here's a game that will allow plays to trade Dogecoin for in-game services and goods:
https://www.universeprojects.c...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
you are being silly, most dollars in existence are data in federal reserve bank computers, physical currency a small fraction
I accept Euros as payment for my services, and I convert them directly to UKP because I don't have a Euro account. This occurs at my bank in between the client paying and me receiving the money. That doesn't mean I don't "accept Euros as payment", and only an idiot would suggest it does, since I manifestly do accept Euros as payment. L2Think.
If you quote a price in Euros and stand by it if the value of the Euro fluctuates then you can say you accept Euros... but it seems this is not the case here. It'd seem MS quotes the price of whatever you're buying according to BitPay's conversion rate at the instant the payment is done. ... So MS is accepting bitcoin as a form of payment but not as a form of currency.
Pedantry at its finest.
It's like saying "nobody accepts credit cards" because your credit card processor deposits USD in your bank.
A way to ruin it besides the exchanges breaking themselves?
The concept of "cryptocurrency" is still fairly new. Maybe there lurks some kind of deficiency which we are not aware of right now, but which some smart guy will discover one day. Of course, we can't use any kind of system if we constantly worry about some flaw which isn't even known to exist. But it's good to think about this stuff every now and then.
I believe you can already do this by using physical Bitcoins.
Seriously. I have yet to walk into a store and have them refuse my actual dollars.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
> 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.
Essentially *all* Dollars, in a computer or in paper, are just representations of debt. When the Federal Reserve issues paper money, it's backed by Treasury bonds and mortgages. When banks make loans, the loan check is backed by the loan they just made.
Or more insidiously, backed by the loan they just made to some other guy.
So, essentially the proposition is that one can pay back principal plus interest with the assets of existing principal, considered on the level of the financial system as a whole.
While it is a remarkably convenient system by which the banks can steal the added value of all human productivity gains, it remains the case that P + I != P, and inability to repay loans is inevitable. But by then, of course, the banks have the actual gains from imaginary value loaned, and it's time to blame the victim.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Of course they subcontract the actual BTC processing to someone else. That's not the point. The point is that they deemed the demand sufficient to warrant doing something like that in the first place, and to make a public announcement about it.
And what's wrong with that? Even if you bury them in Dogecoin transactions, they're only worth 0.00021$USD as of this writing. So you'd need to be charged 48 whole Dogecoins before hitting one cent. If a website I like reading every day charged me 1 Dogecoin per day in subscription fees I wouldn't mind if it helped them.
I know you'll say it isn't much, but web hosting really doesn't cost much unless you have millions of visitors every day.
Let's say your Web hosting costs 10$USD per month. Let's also assume you charge 1 Dogecoin per day per user, at an average of 30 days per month.
10.00$ / 30 = 0.34$ per day
0.34$ / 0.00021$ = 1620 users
That's the break-even cost for what I consider expensive Web hosting (I pay under 10$ per month). Any users above 1620 means (tiny) profits which you can then re-invest in other Dogecoin-accepting Websites, games and services.
There's transaction fees for trading Dogecoins of course, let's assume 1 Dogecoin to be on the safe side. So you make your users pay every month instead of every day. That means 31 Dogecoins per month per user, or 0.00651$ per user. That's not even one cent per month, with the transaction fees.
And as a user, even if you pay for a one-month subscription and decide it wasn't worth it after a few days and there's a "no refunds" policy in place, it won't matter to you since you haven't even lost one whole cent in the process.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins