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Comment by onestone | Hacker News Reader

It matters. Automatically exchanging large amounts of BTC for USD creates a downward pressure on the BTC exchange rate.

Organizations which truly support Bitcoin would choose to keep it.

If what you said was true the exchange rate would have collapsed in the last 2 years (BitPay and Coinbase accumulated 60,000+ merchants who began accepting Bitcoin over the last 2 years and most of them automatically convert BTC to USD). But instead, the exchange rate rose from $10 to $580: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg730ztgSzm1g10z...

Why? Because as Bitcoin is accepted in more and more places, it increases its subjective value, so more and more people are looking to get some bitcoins, which counterbalances the downward selling pressure.

I'm not sure why you disagree. Of course there are multiple factors and some of them counterbalance. And of course what I mentioned is just one of these factors.

The price rose primarily because of the Willy bot, aka Mark Karpeles artificially inflating the price. Read the willy report.

You cannot claim the current ~$600 level is still due to Willy. Willy stopped running 6 months ago, so the market has already corrected itself by now.

Willy wasn't the only reason bitcoin bubbled a few months ago

Baby steps. Maybe an employee will ask to be paid partly in BTC which I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige to avoid the conversion fees.

Organizations which truly support Bitcoin would choose to spend it, not hoard it.

Spend it for products or services - sure. Immediately exchange all of it for a fiat currency - not so much.

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