9 ms·
Virgin Galactic to accept Bitcoin [video]
- oleganza 13y agoAnother way to invest in Bitcoin when exchanges are not very liquid: accept BTC at the current rate and boost the value and awareness by making a bold move.
- grey-area 13y agoWhen businesses actually price products or services in a digital currency as opposed to accepting it, we'll know it has arrived and is ready to rival national currencies.
- user24 13y agoAgree. All these companies "accepting" bitcoin are actually just accepting USD and "converting" bitcoin.
- fat0wl 13y agoTotally agreed -- they pretend to support the platform for the hipster cred & expanded market, but I'm sure the corporate policy is "Bitcoin arrives. Bitcoin is immediately placed on exchange". I'd be surprised if corporations would gamble so dangerously by keeping a Bitcoin store. As long as they price against USD and convert immediately, they can only suffer limited losses from price swings.
- aianus 13y agoThey don't suffer any losses from price swings. Pretty much everyone uses a third party payment processor that guarantees that when the retailer charges a bitcoin customer $100 they get $100 less fees directly into their bank account.
- fat0wl 13y agoahhhh genius. of course. make it the problem of somebody who's trying to prop it up or actually believes in the exchange rate ;)
- Helianthus 13y agoUnrelated: I've greatly enjoyed your comment history--particularly the bicycle metaphor and the moral stance on Bitcoin.
- fat0wl 13y agoahaha thanks bud!! it's been exhausting because they have so many buzzwords designed to handle counter-arguments, so many people with money invested, and well -- the fact is people are willing to pay for them. What I've been learning is that people will radically alter their lifestyle/views/demeanor when presented with the possibility for a cashout. They kinda get tunnelvision. Plus, there happen to some idealistic tech people who wouldn't mind suffering a minor loss just to see a cool idea work, so they'll keep playing with it even if they lose a couple hundred bucks here and there. It makes for some intense momentum... Hopefully you will see me posting much less about this and much more about music signal processing + machine learning apps I'm working on :P Looking through your comments... maybe you want to join me on some anti-Bitcoin venture? I'm thinking of compiling a site providing a detailed argument of why it makes no sense just so that I don't have to keep wasting my breath lol. But I mean the truth is a lot of these arguments are freely available (especially if you check the manifestos written up by some of Bitcoin's competitors or qualified economists). I just feel bad that naive people think it's some sort of tech "investment" and if you don't write negative stuff on the threads their first comment is "Where do I get some?". I bet this is how all pyramid schemers feel at first. Like you're investing in a company, it's just that the company doesn't make anything or do anything... Then Bitcoiners try to say that the worth is in the "ingenuity of the process" or something but then its like... THIS IS AN OPEN SOURCE CRYPTO GAME FOR F__K'S SAKE The point is... Bitcoin is an international hoax and I get bored at work! I also tend to think that HN is turning into watered-down pseudo tech and Bitcoin is the epitome of that. All these "crypto-miners" who just execute pre-compiled code or whatever... yeesh. Fantasy adds romanticism to peoples lives, but this one will cause too many ruined fortunes. (Side note: It seems you & I are always arguing with the same guys, lolololol.... some of these handles are all too familiar)
- drewblaisdell 13y ago... with a much smaller fee than if they simply accepted USD.
- twoodfin 13y agoIt almost goes without saying that such a transition would require the price of Bitcoin relative to a basket of other currencies to remain more stable by a couple orders of magnitude than it does today.
- krrrh 13y agoAlso, he didn't say it had to be bitcoin.
- oleganza 13y agoWhen this happens the price of 1 BTC will be over 1 million of today's dollars and national currencies will seize to exist.
- jerguismi 13y agoI don't see pricing as significant goal with Bitcoin. Other currencies can be used for pricing. I use bitcoin myself, and never by from stores which price the goods in Bitcoin, because they are most certainly rip-off prices. The good way is to price in fiat, then use something like bitpay exchange rate at checkout.
- grey-area 13y agoI don't see pricing as significant goal with Bitcoin. If that's the case, it's not a currency. I do think this is something Bitcoin needs to address if it is to be taken seriously as a medium of exchange.
- aianus 13y agoThere are a lot of countries in the world that have their own currencies but price goods and services in EUR or USD. I know in Romania things are priced in EUR from cell phone top-ups to real estate.
- grey-area 13y agoThat's a sign of a failing currency that no-one wants to use though, it's a bad signal when people really want to transact in something else but are forced to use a currency.
- mrb 13y agoThen you will miss the moment when "Bitcoin has arrived". You see, if anything the last 5 years has taught us, is that Bitcoin's adoption can continue to dramatically increase despite wild volatility. (Data point: Bitpay signed up 10,000 merchants through a period when 1 BTC was sometimes losing 50% of its value intra-day!) Volatility is unfortunate, that's for sure, and it is expected to decline over time as trading volume increases. But if you want to measure Bitcoin's success/adoption, look at actual adoption, instead of volatility.
- grey-area 13y agoActual adoption as a currency requires pricing in that currency, that requires stability.
- mrb 13y agoThen you will miss Bitcoin's success as payment processing, as a remittance (replacing Western Union, MoneyGram...), etc. Bitcoin is used more than just as a currency. Restricting your view to only its use as a currency is not seeing Bitcoin's success in these other areas.
- runako 13y agoFinally, a service that can be denominated in integral Bitcoin values.
- scott_meade 13y ago"she paid in bitcoin, which was transferred into actual dollars "so there's a fixed price ... [and] we can actually pay her money back, if she changes her mind" Seems no different than if the buyer had sold her Bitcoin and paid Virgin Galactic in cash. The real trick will be when they can accept Bitcoin, keep the Bitcoin, and make any refunds and adjustments in Bitcoin.
- kgo 13y agoTrue, but they were able to process a single quarter-million dollar transaction and easily turn that into 'real' cash. That's still a pretty decent accomplishment for magic internet money.
- VMG 13y agoBitcoin transfers have some advantages compared to cash or wire transfers.
- drewblaisdell 13y ago> Seems no different than if the buyer had sold her Bitcoin and paid Virgin Galactic in cash. I'm not sure if this differs for six-figure transactions, but transacting fiat currency generally costs a vendor ~3%. Receiving bitcoins and immediately converting them back to USD/GBP can be done for less than one percent of the amount of the transaction.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago> transacting fiat currency generally costs a vendor ~3% 1. Bitcoin is no less a fiat currency than the U.S. dollar or Japanese yen. 2. For small retail transactions, yes, 3% seems right. Larger transactions, however, are generally done by wire. These transfers carry a fixed fee and are generally a very small percentage of the transaction value.
- bunderbunder 13y ago> 1. Bitcoin is no less a fiat currency than the U.S. dollar or Japanese yen. Depends on what you mean by "fiat currency", which tends to get used with a few different (if related) meanings. One is "non-backed state-issued currency". Under that definition it isn't. Another is "currency with no intrinsic value". Under that definition it is.
- cs702 13y agoIt seems that with every passing day, another prominent institution or business starts accepting Bitcoin for payment, Virgin Galactic being the latest example. In just a few years, Bitcoin has gone from experiment to global phenomenon. I wouldn't be surprised if in coming years at least some bitcoin users start measuring their wealth in bitcoins, and therefore also evaluating exchange rates, not in terms of how many US dollars, euros, etc. they can buy with a bitcoin, but the other way around: what is the cost, in bitcoins, of a single dollar, euro, etc.? Looking at exchange rates in this manner changes people's perspective on volatility, which is always a relative measure. For example, since the beginning of this year, the price of a US dollar has declined by more than 98%, from BTC 0.074 to just over BTC 0.001, which makes the dollar look extremely volatile! -- PS. I'm NOT saying the dollar is extremely volatile! I'm also NOT saying that Bitcoin is more stable! What I'm saying is that if and as Bitcoin adopters start measuring their wealth in bitcoins, their perspective on what is and isn't volatile will change, as demonstrated by my example. -- Edits: expanded second and third paragraphs; added PS.
- rfnslyr 13y agoQuestion: Where can a Canadian passively invest $50 - 200 a month safely and watch their investment grow?
- jzwinck 13y agoThe TSX Composite Index: https://www.google.com/finance?cid=9291235 https://www.google.com/finance?cid=9291235 There are others if you have a more specific interest: http://web.tmxmoney.com/indices.php?locale=EN http://web.tmxmoney.com/indices.php?locale=EN
- rfnslyr 13y agoI meant into Bitcoin.
- personalcompute 13y ago"Safely" -> TSX Composite Index Drop that qualifier and we can talk Bitcoin.
- shocks 13y ago$250,000 for a flight. That puts it at about 333 BTC right now.
- base698 13y agoAs someone who owned about that many at my peak, that hurts so bad.
- pkallberg 13y agoThis is a great marketing stunt!
- napolux 13y agoJust marketing IMHO. You say you'll accept bitcoins and then you'll have 10s of articles talking about your company.
- Angostura 13y agoSounds to me as if Mr Branson has a bunch of Bitcoin and would like to cash-in early next week.
- fat0wl 13y agoyeah the fact that the Bitcoin scam is spreading raises eyebrows. Companies want to accept it to sound futuristic but they should really be shutting it down. Notice how none of the tech-giants want to get involved with it. Bitcoin isn't for the technologically advanced who are "being rewarded for being sooooo smart and adopting early", it's a scammer platform. I heard a suggestion for a gold-backed digital currency once. That makes much more sense to me. Instead of getting into magic bean territory with monstrous gains/losses, just put 100k into gold, design a system with 100k "eGoldcoin" or whatever u wanna call it then just trade the coins. The platform would never tank because people know roughly what it's worth. It would be way less exciting, well... because it's sane.
- VMG 13y ago> I heard a suggestion for a gold-backed digital currency once. I think you fell for a joke.
- fat0wl 13y agoThink about it man, if the Bitcoin delusion ends it is worth nothing. In a gold-backed online currency if it failed the users could just be beneficiaries of the trust. I'm not saying this is the ideal solution because I think maybe a completely fiat digital currency COULD work, just not with the Bitcoin scheme. And I'm not saying Bitcoin can't work in the long-run. I'm saying it's not working NOW. It is not performing its intended function... unless that intended function is as a volatile speculator market.
- VMG 13y agoYou don't understand the point of Bitcoin. There can't be a decentralized digital currency that is backed by real-world assets. Who guarantees that you're Egoldcoin is worth an ounce of gold?
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoMetaphorically this is fantastic. What better way to pay for a barely controlled rapid ascent and descent than with a highly unstable 'currency'!
- knodi 13y agothe problem is getting BTC in the US. You have to a P2P sale which most likely at some point will lead to you getting scammed. The banks need to offer a currency exchange from USD to BTC. And then bitcoins are going to really take off.