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Comment by Sprint | Hacker News Reader

They don't accept Bitcoin as Bitcoin. They only employ a third-party service to take Bitcoin on their behalf and exchange them for US dollars. It's not showing any trust in Bitcoin, just hopping on a bandwagon for PR.

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How is that different from accepting credit cards via a third party?

If they had faith on the long-term future of BitCoin, they would have accepted them as BitCoins and stored them as some sort of an investment rather than immediately converting them to USD.

Companies don't like having their costs in one currency, and their revenue in another. It's called currency risk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_risk) and companies generally try to avoid it or hedge against it.

Isn't that a bit paradoxical? If the long term success of BitCoin rides on people using it to make transactions (e.g. paying for games by zynga), then what good is it for businesses to hoard large amounts of it for speculation?

It's still a method of accepting payment.

Don't forget that bitcoin is also a payment system.

Just goes to show, you don't need to trust bitcoin to use bitcoin ;)

I think the first half of your statement is true (employing a third-party service to take Bitcoin) but the second half (automatically exchanging them to USD) is an assumption that can change over time as Zynga gets comfortable managing Bitcoin.

I would think it's valuable for the entire Bitcoin network to have more merchants accepting it than less, so how is Zynga accepting Bitcoin a bad thing?

This is like arguing that accepting credit cards means you don't accept dollars, because no green pieces of paper are being exchanged.

They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are still only accepting USD: just making it easier for people with bitcoin to give USD to them.

What they do with the payment after receiving it is irrelevant. You can pay using bitcoin. It doesn't make any difference to the customer that it's going through another company and getting converted to USD

The thing to remember here is that people are changing USD > BTC, paying with BTC, and then that BTC is going back to USD. What's the point? This accomplishes nothing other than allowing Bitcoin exchanges to collect tx fees between customers and Zynga. It's non-conducive to adoption.

On the other hand, if Zynga were holding BTC, paying employees in BTC, and those employees started consuming with BTC, then they would actually be "using" it. Otherwise it's the same exact thing as punching in your credit card details.

Yes and I can pay for everything with euros in the United States by that logic. All I have to do is go to a friendly bank on the corner and convert to USD.

No, that's completely different logic.

You can pay for something with euros in the US as long as they accept it, even if after all they do is go to the bank and convert to USD.

> They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are not accepting real USD. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

hint: This is how merchant accounts with payment processors work.

I got into a public dispute with Max Keiser and his psychotic followers about this and people said it was semantics. There are three distinct moments: 1) Accepting Bitcoin (kudos to BitPay and Coinbase for making it so easy!), which is primarily a cheap PR move; 2) Having real commerce going thru this channel (i.e. volume as USD equivalent) - everybody seems shy about it; and 3) Truly accepting Bitcoin into a Bitcoin wallet!

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