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You should look into bitcoin (at least know about it and how it can help you as a merchant). Any payment company that deals with credit cards is not just a payment company but a fraud detection service; at least that is what it should be selling themselves as. Fighting CC fraud (and bank transfer fraud) is a challenge as the system was not designed for the digital space.

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it's far too difficult to acquire them at the moment for normal citizens, at least in the UK.

I spent at least 4 hours trying to legitimately acquire bitcoins to purchase some pretty physical coins from https://www.casascius.com before giving up.

If you only spent 4 hours trying to acquire a completely new currency that is not backed by any major authority yet still usable all over the internet, you might want to spend some more time :) And yes, getting a hold of them is still a challenge. If you want to buy in bulk, you can wire money to many of the exchanges for standard wire rates.

Do you know of any European based company accepting bitcoins?

In Germany, there's a bar called Room 77 that only takes bitcoins:

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154140277/berlin-restaurant-ex...

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