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Microsoft Store No Longer Accepts Bitcoins As Payment (techtimes.com)

Posted by timothy on from the just-slip-the-money-in-the-floppy-drive dept.

westlake writes: It may come as a surprise to many here [but not all! -- Ed.], but back in December 2014, Microsoft began accepting Bitcoin.as payments for apps, games, and music purchased through the Windows Store, for its Win 10, Windows Phone and Xbox customers. Big-ticket items like MS Office were excluded. The service has been quietly discontinued. Crypto-currencies may excite the geek, but the Windows Store is mass-market and middle class, and the interest just might not be there.

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. "...and interest just might not be there..." by mmell · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Uh, obviously interest is not there - or at least, Microsoft's interest apparently isn't there.

    Let's face it - one quick look at Microsoft's track record and you have to wonder why Microsoft would ever even think of touching Bitcoin. Bitcoin is (ostensibly) about privacy, surely this would be antithetical to Microsoft's demonstrated business practices to date? Then again, maybe Microsoft is only just realizing what a farce the concept of Bitcoin really is.

    1. Re:"...and interest just might not be there..." by vux984 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What is farcical about bitcoin?

      1 -Its instability.

      2- The gold-rush where wealth was distributed to speculative early adopter miners.

      3- The schisms that seem to regularly threaten to tear it apart. Including the latest one which last I read was in a stalemate and bitcoin transaction times are now starting to get out of hand.

      There's a lot to bitcoin.

      Yes, there certainly is. But that doesn't make it any less farcical TODAY.

      You sound like a someone in the 1990s who calls the internet a toy and that it would never be part of "real" business.

      An analogy there might aptly compare Bitcoin to a single BBS a precursor to what came afterwards. After all, there are more crypto currencies than Bitcoin out there... and new ones being developed daily. 30 years from now, will anybody be using bitcoin? Or will it be a "compuserve"?

  2. Re:Hey buddy... by jareth-0205 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hey Buddy, I'd like to buy your software with my bitcoins, but the smallest coin I have is $413USD.... How the hell do you make change with the smallest integer amount of a bit coin is $413.16???? That is the problem with bitcoins... they can't be subdivided and there just aren't enough of them for each person on earth to have even ONE.

    I mean there are so many flaws in the Bitcoin concept you really don't have to make new ones up that are obviously false...

  3. MS Store is instant delivery, but BitCoin is not by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You will see this happening more and more, as the BitCoin network has dived in performance in recent weeks with transactions taking up to an hour to be written into the block chain - so you can't really run an "instant delivery" platform on that basis, as you have no guarantee of the transaction going through until its actually happened.

    Either customers have to wait until the transaction is written into the block chain to actually get their purchase, or the vendor has to take a risk in giving the product before the transaction is set in stone, allowing for transaction reversal attacks. As most stuff on these type of stores are impulse purchases, or instant gratification purchases, most users will not want to wait out the block chain and will rather go elsewhere.

    Now, yes MS does control a lot of these devices and thus can take the product back again (eg XBox games, Metro apps etc) but this just turns the whole thing into a PR nightmare issue, and doesn't stop users from purchasing music (which are not DRMed) on hacked accounts and reversing the transaction.

    So, all in all, BitCoin currently doesn't work for these type of stores.