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French Tobacco Shops Will Sell Bitcoin and Ethereum Starting January 2019 (venturebeat.com)

Tobacco shops are a staple of daily life across France, selling cigarettes, newspapers, magazines, and lottery tickets. Come January, these most traditional of merchants will take a plunge into the future by adding cryptocurrencies to their wares. From a report: The French Federation of Tobacco Vendors (French Confederation Nationale des Buralistes), which represents the 27,000 tobacco shops in France, announced that it has approved plans for its members to sell Bitcoin and Ethereum to customers. The program is expected to start in 3,000 locations in January, eventually rolling out to all tobacco shops across the country. Of course, the timing is somewhat less than ideal, as prices of cryptocurrencies have been in free fall most of this year. Just this week, Bitcoin hit a new low for 2018. While the effort is seen as a new potential revenue source for these merchants, it remains far from clear how interested the general public is in owning cryptocurrencies.

2 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't that backwards? by bkmoore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wasn't the original point of crypto to act as a replacement for cash in order to purchase goods and services? Not the other way around? Shouldn't the tobacco shops be accepting crypto as a form of payment for goods and services?

  2. Re:Are you sure about that? by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    B) are you really trying to say that currencies are never are treated as investments? Really?

    No, but really:
    a) All currencies trend downwards in the long term, due to inflation.
    b) To make money, you're relying on the difference between two currencies becoming larger over time.
    c) You're relying mostly on one currency going down, not the other one going up (ie. the other one won't be worth more in the country where it's used).

    Right now:
    i) All cryptocurrencies are going down so the advice of any sensible person would be to switch to $, not the other way around.
    ii) It's a negative feedback loop, less people using Bitcoin as a currency means it won't "recover", it will be worth less and less as time passes.

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