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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.

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Let's wait until MS comes up with its own currency by NotInHere · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. Re:Hey buddy... by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.