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Comment by adeptus | Hacker News Reader

"In all three cases, note that the economic activity involves something that is either outright illegal or in a legal gray area"

I stopped reading right there. This is nothing more than just another article by somebody who doesn't understand bitcoin and couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. There's over 20,000 LEGAL retail merchants already accepting bitcoin, and this is just the beginning.

TL;DR: Troll article, author doesn't have a clue about bitcoin.

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I would consider the implicit reason why a vendor might accept bitcoin. Accepting bitcoin is akin to free advertising for ones' company since bitcoin has so much buzz.

The business-logic-related reasons for accepting bitcoin are far and few considering how volatile it is and the non-instant transaction verification delay.

There's a couple others: No chargebacks, no international transaction fees, and as long as the volatility leans in an upward direction then $X in BTC that you sit on for a few days before converting to local currency generally turns out to be more than $X in realized revenue.

WordPress got on board with accepting BitCoin early, primarily as a way to accept payments from countries not supported by PayPal: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitc...

Promotional purposes notwithstanding, the best legitimate use cases for accepting BTC so far seem to be online services (web hosting, domains), where the transaction delay and risk of double-spend isn't a big deal; and charities, who risk little and potentially gain much by publishing an address for a donation wallet.

I wonder how many of those online merchants you can actually complete a transaction with? 25 external links on that page appear to be broken for starters.

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