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Microsoft Store No Longer Accepts Bitcoins As Payment (techtimes.com)
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.
I'm looking forward to clippycoin, the coin that is bound to the win32 API and windows kernel, you can only pay with it if you have microsoft windows.
Microsoft has, willingly or unwillingly as been a government "partner" since Windows 7 (perhaps earlier). They collect data on Windows 10 and in all likelihood (they would be forbidden to discuss this) share all data collected with the government. The US Government (like Russia) is against anything that protects anonymity, so it stands to reason that MS would also be against anything that protects anonymity/privacy including Bitcoin. Wonder if MS will get a bounty for reporting Windows 10 users who have installed TOR clients. :D
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
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.
Right now, one bitcoin equals 413.16 USD. One satoshi is 0.00000001 bitcoin, so each satoshi is worth 0.0000041316 USD. That means you need 14522 satoshi to have 0.06 USD.
If each satoshi were worth 0.06 USD, that means one bitcoin would be worth six million USD and I'd be a multi-millionaire.
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"?
To get a top end Surfacebook and a top end Macbook Pro Retina you pay a premium price. Last I checked the Surfacebook was more expensive. When you buy the Macbook you have privacy. When you buy the Surfacebook you have MS adware/spyware/unstoppable telemetry tracking what you type and where you go etc. So at this point in the game with the security of OSX, and end user privacy (not an option in Windows any longer) Apple is no longer the overpriced arrogant choice. Now the better value for your money is to get the cheaper privacy respecting ore secure OS, that isn't hell bent on pushing telemetry at you.
So for all of their scroogled/gmail man propaganda, MS is now doing more and worse, and that is after trying with a heavy hand to force you to upgrade. However where is the value add they are supposed to bring to the table?
Most of these people in turn are part of the middle class, regardless of whether they're using Windows at home or on the job.
Well, if we are to accept this conclusion (and it is basically without any supporting evidence), the same could be said of all computer users and therefore all bitcoin users.
So what point is being made by calling Windows Store "middle class" is a mystery. The fact it is mass-market is a million times more relevant. It got discontinued because a tiny percentage of its targeted customers are interested in using bitcoins, not because bitcoins are your working classes money.
Since you're comparing to Visa, you might prefer to use CoinBase.com to make BitCoiN-backed online money transfers instantly and cheaply. Both of them require trust in a third party and can be reversed after the fact, but are capable of an extremely high number of cheap transactions per second.
If you're thinking "but BitCoiN is supposed to be P2P and trustless!" then why would you compare it to Visa? It's more analogous to mailing someone a brick of gold.
I apologize if someone advertised BitCoiN to you as "free" or even capable of Visa-level scaling yet, because it isn't.
Actually I saw lots of people in both when I am at a mall with both stores.
I own a macbook pro and only went to the store once. My hard drive crashed and they told me that I needed a new drive.
I checked the drive using SMART and it said it was ok. I took it home and repartitioned and formatted the drive and it has worked just great for the last 3 years. Over all not impressed with the Apple store service.
The Microsoft store was okay but I just didn't see the point. I see little reason to go to an Apple or Microsoft store unless I was going to buy a new Windows machine. I believe that the Windows computers at the microsoft store are free of demoware.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
CoinBase looks like another Mt Gox - it achieves its scaling because its not touching the BitCoin ledger, its purely doing exchanges through its own liquidity.
BitCoins current issues with scaling are completely down to the core developer team refusing to fix the issues - there are several ways the current problems can be resolved, they just don't want to solve them for some reason.
"I would not feel safe leaving my computer with a "technician" who accidentally breaks shit while they are trying to do a routine part replacement."
Yes, when something goes wrong with your Made In Chechnya laptop you can totally bring it to a Microsoft Store, have the CPU fan and battery replaced, and if the tech breaks something else in the process he will admit it and fix it for free.
The story has now been updated to read:
Microsoft has just confirmed that the update it made to the Windows Store FAQ page was just a mistake and that Windows 10 would continue to support Bitcoin.
Breakfast served all day!