Ask HN: Where do you spend Bitcoins?
I've heard from store/marketplace owners that have implemented BTC that they get very few transactions through BTC. As the founder of an online marketplace, [Tindie](http://www.tindie.com), I'm very interested in learning if adding BTC checkout has a dramatic impact on sales.
My suspicion, which I think many BTC skeptics hold, is that most BTC transactions are more for currency conversions than purchasing goods.
HN, where are you spending your bitcoins? Maybe I've got my head in the sand, and bc I don't own any BTCs, just don't notice the places you can spend them?
(Any store/marketplace operators I'm also interested to hear your experiences post implementing BTC checkout).
61 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadI advise you to look at Coinbase API if you want to implement checkout using BTCs.
https://www.cavirtex.com/news
In general, I'd much rather give value to a vendor than play the credit-card --> reward points --> $ game to reduce the effective cost of the charges credit-card companies levy on vendors.
Every time I write and mail a check or arrange for a bank balance transfer, I think "Man, if only the person at the other end used bitcoin. This would be faster, easier, and cheaper." It's so much easier for person-to-person transfers than carrying cash, making change, etc. You can also get a sense for how much practical use bitcoin is getting by searching Craigslist for "Bitcoin".
At the moment, there aren't that many places to spend them. The economic exchange systems we have today are quite good. It remains to be seen if any other system is ultimately superior.
One was an email address, so false result, and 3 more were not real goods, rather offers to buy/sell bitcoin itself.
We keep an "order out" Bitcoin budget and refill it with new Bitcoins from time to time. REALLY cheap food due to the BTC prices as of late.
[1] https://ssl.reddit.com/gold
[2] http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/
[3] http://wizardsofcheese.com/wizardscreed.html
[4] https://www.facebook.com/thewaflstop
[5] http://seansoutpost.com/
[6] http://www.cheapair.com/
It's fairly irrelevant to you as a vendor whether most transactions are currency conversion, though. Who cares? What matters to you is your bottom line, not what the economy as a whole looks like.
What actually matters is how much it costs you to implement vs how much extra revenue it brings you. Given that it wouldn't cost much at all, why not add it?
The thing that would scare me about accepting bit coin for transactions is that in a scenario where BTC is rapidly losing value, it would be easy for lots of orders to be placed in a short amount of time.
e.g. I just tried to buy 36 months of reddit gold at $89.97, which came up as 0.10454514 BTC = $860/BTC... which is almost exactly the trading rate on Bitstamp.
For example, with BitPay your POS terminal tells a price denominated in USD to BitPay, (BitPay quotes a bitcoin-denominated price to the customer with a unique address and the customer pays), and then BitPay tells the merchant the payment came through. BitPay credits the merchant account the USD-denominated value. At the end of the day, BitPay settles up the account (eg. ACH payment to merchant bank account).
Never does the merchant hold bitcoins.
We get about one BTC order a week at my store and then hold our bitcoins rather than immediately cashing out for USD. The largest orders were from someone who told us overtly that they were basically making orders from us as a way of cashing out their bitcoins.
Also, if you keep the money in bitcoins, you could gain if the price keeps rising, making your bitcoin sales worth more. Of course, that's a risky bet, but the potential upside is still 10x-100x over the next few years.
I know that we also need to start spending it for it to have any real value, so my wife and I agree that as of January we're going to start putting our takeaway funds into bitcoin and gradually spending that, while also keeping some aside as an investment.
At the end of the day, you want to be net-long BitCoin. Its hard to set up a systemic trade like that because its one-sided. The price of the underlying assets just becomes a distortion. That is if I am understanding you correctly.
When you see government and national bank attempt to pump out money, they are trying to do the opposite. This means that if you want to buy a new TV there's no point in waiting, you won't get a significantly better deal next month.
Bitcoins are still a bit weird, because you currently can't cash in large sums. You can't do your transactions in Bitcoin, you need a stable proxy currency for setting the value of your goods. We have maybe 8000 active products currently, all manually price in five difference currencies to maximize profit. This only works because these currencies are pretty stable and we can avoid adjusting the price for a product after a few month after initial release. It priced in Bitcoin, we would have to adjust the price of every single item multiple time a day. Of cause given the price fluctuation it would still be more profitable to simple buy Bitcoins, rather than physical goods and the later sell them... But that would be bad for employment.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Bitcoin, precisely for the reason other people like it. I believe that governments need to be able to control currencies. If you don't trust your government, then that's a different problem.
You want to set the price in each marked separately, finding the maximum price for that product in the given market. A product you can sell for say £10 in the UK, might sell equally well for the equivalent of £12 or even £15 in Scandinavia. You could sell the item for the £10 in every country, but why miss out on the profit?
Just using an exchange rate won't take the market (competition) and purchasing power in the different countries. Also you'll end up fighting sells personal who will want to be able to set the sales price, or set them as dictated by the suppliers ( it's technically illegal in many countries, but very few are willing to fight the suppliers, so you need to support it ).
Even in the Euro countries you'll want to be able to price a product differently in each country.
I'm aware BTC's appreciating value so I periodically top up to offset spending.
I've lurked on HN for quite some time, but could not pass up this opportunity to obtain feedback from such an excellent community.