Overstock and amagi metals have both said they are working on that with their suppliers. Amagi has even said they don't plan on accepting fiat after 2016.

Bad for bitcoin is certainly a matter of opinion. To me, I view wider adoption as good for Bitcoin. Downward pressure on price certainly does not bode well for growing adoption.

I want people to want to prefer to have Bitcoins. Being able to spend something going down in value at Newegg does not make them want to have Bitcoins. A rising price makes them want to have Bitcoins. Being able to gamble with them online makes them want to have Bitcoins.

Newegg has a big sale for bitcoin purchases. On another forum I know a lot of ppl scrambling to get bitcoin right now to take advantage of this sale. It's $75 off $300 or $150 off $500.

Link!

I think "no chargebacks" are theoretically a bit of a red herring benefit for businesses at the moment.

My business recently got a notification from our card processor that we are a "high risk business" because 1.2% of our sales are chargebacked (90% of them are fraudulent cards). This is determined by:

total # chargebacks / total # successful payments

No chargebacks is nice, but honest customers will never use Bitcoin. Honest customers using Bitcoin reduces your total # successful payments, but no change to volume of total # chargebacks.

IF we have customers (and I know this is an if) who pay with Bitcoin because it's an option (and I'm confident we do) whereas they would of simply paid by card otherwise, as a business owner in my current situation I would rather they paid by card to dilute the total # chargebacks.

Even if you're not on the edge of having your card payments shut down, the point is people paying with Bitcoin are probably your honest customers as by using Bitcoin they are placing all their trust in the merchant. So no chargebacks is a moot benefit, anyone paying with Bitcoin would never be a customer who would perform a chargeback on you anyway.

I know this isn't Bitcoins fault, and "no chargebacks" is a benefit which can be enjoyed when cards become irrelevant (I don't think we're likely to ever see this anytime soon). But for now "no chargebacks" is a red herring imo.

As a business that accepts bit coin, can you tell me what is done with the bit coin upon receipt? Does the business keep the bitcoins and eventually change them to fiat when they feel the market is right? Do they plan to keep the bitcoins indefinitely? Do they have a system that converts the bitcoins to fiat almost instantaneously?

Most businesses will use Bitpay to convert it to fiat at point of sale. For bigger businesses, this is also preferable as keeping Bitcoin increases their risk profile which shareholders might not be comfortable with.

We use Coinbase to accept Bitcoin, and we also have invested a reasonable amount as a speculative investment. When we take a Bitcoin payment we account for it properly but just send it to our offline wallet to add to our speculative position.

Our webhost accepts Bitcoin, if our sales volume in Bitcoin was large enough we would be interested in paying them for hosting in Bitcoin but it's just no where near enough to do that yet.

How then is retail adoption all that good for bitcoin? I understand that it increases the visibility of the currency, but if it's immediately sold off for fiat, doesn't that just make it looks like the market is selling more than buying?

Short term it's not good. Long term, as more and more merchants accept, the average person will realize, hey this bitcoin stuff is for real. If basically everywhere accepts bitcoin, people will begin to adopt. Then the consumer adoption will outgrow the merchant adoption.

Yeah a lot of people think that retail adoption is putting a lot of sell pressure on the market and driving the price down.

I think in the long term it could be very good, once suppliers start accepting Bitcoin, once employees request to be paid in Bitcoin, and once there are more places to spend them they never need to be sold off.

Don't know how likely any of that is though (probably not very).

Won't this Just lead to bitcoin value becoming more in line with the USD, so that it isn't all that much different in price than the other international fiats out there? Seems like bad news for almost everyone who has Invested to this point

Not really sure what that means?

If bitcoin becomes more and more accepted by retailers and the market starts seeing it as more and more of a sell commodity since the retailers are immediately converting it to fiat, won't that drive the price down to a point where 1 bitcoin is nearly equal to 1 USD, much like 1 CAD is nearly equal 1 CAD. What is the incentive for bitcoin to be worth 200-500 USD each if they can be spent exactly like the dollar?

Universal adoption seems to feel like it would be treated almost exactly like credit is now, where there isn't actually anything tangible the retailers are receiving other than the fiat money the bitcoin is being converted to.

And retail will want the bitcoin to be as stable as possible. If it starts becoming accepted in land based stores more and more, it would be a pain to constantly reconfigure signage to show how much something is in bitcoin that day, minute, or hour, much like how us companies tend not to accept foreign currency because of the trickiness of the exchange.

http://www.newegg.com/global/uk/Info...ID=1354&Type=3

You're comparing one arbitrary unit with another, and I don't think that line of reasoning makes any sense.

Agree that price needs stabilising before it will be spent and traded in more day to day things. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Fair enough. I'm no expert for sure, can you tell me why it doesn't make sense though? And what about the comparison of credit and bitcoin? Both are essentially non - physical forms of currency that are immediately transferred to fiat, yet 1 unit of Mastercard credit isn't equal to 200-500 usd. What is the difference in the two mediums there?

No, if bitcoin becomes widely accepted, it will not tend towards 1 US dollar, it'll tend toward a stable price, but that price will depend on the marketcap divided by the number of bitcoins. The market cap of the US dollar is 100s of trillions of USD. If the market cap of bitcoin became 100s of trillions, then because of the fixed number of bitcoins, then each individual bitcoin would be worth millions. The fact that the number of bitcoins is fixed is one of the most important features of it.

Gotcha. So what will go into determining the market cap of the bitcoin?

Why should a bitcoin become one dollar--maybe a millbitcoin will become a dollar, maybe a microbitcoin will become a dollar. The actual price of the individual bitcoins itself isn't important when analysing bitcoin's worth, the important thing is the marketcap.

Consider two companies. Company A is worth 1million dollars at IPO and issues 100,000 shares. So each share is worth 10 dollars each. Company B is worth 100,000 dollars and issues 1000 shares, so each share is worth 1000 dollars each. Do you say that Company B is more valuable because it's shares are more expensive? No. The number of shares issued isn't important and the value of each share isn't important, it's the marketcap that's important.

Marketcap of bitcoin is 6.6billion USD. Divide that by the current issued bitcoins of 13million to get the price of around 500US dollars. If bitcoin gains more users and becomes more used, demand will go up and the marketcap will go up. This will push up the price. Similarly, the reverse will happen.

So it depends on what it's used for and the demand. Let's compare it with some use-cases for bitcoin.

Current bitcoin marketcap: 6billion

Remittances per year (emigrant workers sending money back home): 500billion
Credit Card purchases (3trillion per year.)
Store of value, all the gold in the world=100trillion.

I might be mis-remembering some figures and no one is saying that bitcoin is going to take all of the market in any of those fields. But if it starts to take a sizeable chunk from any of those use cases (remittances, internet purchases, store of value) then it's value will have to go up sizeably.

At the moment, the bitcoin price is mainly based on speculation that that could happen.

Why then is retail acceptance a short term negative? Is it because the immediate sell off of the coins upon acceptance looks like a high sell market?

Because it's a kind of artificial market right now. There are no really good reasons to use bitcoins for purchases. It's mainly done by avid bitcoiners to show support. So avid bitcoiners are buying, retail companies are immediately selling, so that's downward pressure on the price. To make up for that, we need more buyers. But buyers are mainly speculators hoping for the price to shoot up.

I don't fully agree with those who think it's bad though, even if it results in a short-term dip. Part of bitcoin's growing pains, I think.

What's really needed is a market where people who couldn't care less about the idealology of bitcoin start using it because it's the best solution.

And in speculation, how long should that realistically take

Who knows? It might never happen, or bitcoin could take off in some viral way over the next few months. Like all speculation, it's easy to be wise after the event.

Personally, I think cryptocurrencies will be massive in 5 years time, but I have no idea what form that will take, and I dislike bitcoin's POW mining and hope that different cryptocoins will be at the forefront by then.