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Comment by malloreon | Hacker News Reader

"scores of established corporations choosing to accept Bitcoin"

What percentage of these established corporations "accept" bitcoin through VC-funded startups (which are gambling on the possibility of rising bitcoin value), receiving dollars and never actually holding a bitcoin?

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> What percentage of these established corporations "accept" bitcoin through VC-funded startups, receiving dollars and never actually holding a bitcoin?

Basically all of them. No established company wants the associated risk to actually hold bitcoin.

Overstock holds Bitcoin, and its CEO is a big fan of it.

Overstock uses Coinbase for checkout and converts the majority of it to dollars immediately. They have recently begun to hold about 10% of sales made in Bitcoin as Bitcoin and have disclosed this as a risk in their latest 10-Q to investors. Bitcoin accounts for 0.25% of sales, so they're keeping 0.025% of revenue as Bitcoin.

While many may argue the prudence of such a decision (and subsequent disclosure), it's important they disclose this as their Bitcoin holdings lost about 1/2 their value in the last quarter. Any major company keeping any significant percentage of their sales revenue or cash holdings as Bitcoin would be exceedingly irresponsible.

So, they are holding Bitcoin.

Are you going to disclose too that Bitcoin went up 300% since last year? Or you prefer to cherry-pick a shorter time period to make it fit your narrative?

They weren't accepting bitcoin when it was 1/3rd the current price so that figure is irrelevant(also over the past year it is now only up 50% and will be down in less than 2 weeks without some major upwards movement). They started accepting it in January when it was ~300% higher than it is now.

Yes, they are. But only recently, and only a small relative about. I'd forgotten that they'd started doing it a couple months back. That's why I said 'basically all of them', because every other major site I'm aware of that accepts bitcoin doesn't hold any bitcoin. It's immediately converted to dollars at sale time because holding bitcoin for even part of a day is a huge and completely unnecessary risk for a retailer.

The timeframe I mentioned is relevant to Overstock because they were not holding any bitcoin last year. They only began accepting it this year and only began holding it more recently. So only its recent (poor) performance is relevant to Overstock and its investors. As such, it would appear to have been a bad decision in the short term.

I'm not the one in this back and forth who is cherry-picking. Bitcoin up over a different timeframe (a year, since inception, etc) is irrelevant to Overstock, just as its drop to 1/2 of its value over the last few months may be less relevant to your Bitcoin holdings.

Full disclosure: I hold .24826531 Bitcoin personally and in conjunction with my open source project and run Bitcoin Core 0.9.3 64-bit on Windows.

Who cares? It's no different to accepting Euros but getting dollars in your bank account. The point is that they allow users to spend bitcoins (or Euros).

OK, but nobody is arguing that Amazon.com's acceptance of the Argentine peso is a good sign for the future of the currency.

Widespread use of the Argentine peso isn't critical for its success (a strong economy and good monetary policy is). Widespread use is, however, critical for Bitcoin's success, since it relies on a network effect of merchants and consumers.

It certainly isn't bad news.. not to say ARS isn't likely doomed; but there are currencies not on that admittedly-long list of amazon accepted currencies.

OK? I agree with you. I never claimed they were holding it. Lots of Bitcoin-accepting businesses don't hold Bitcoin, and instead use it as a payment processor.

I don't see the problem with it. They still accept Bitcoin, no scare quotes needed.

The point is that a corporation "accepting" Bitcoin is not an endorsement by the corporation for Bitcoin. And even if it were, corporations are hardly the pinnacles of ethics and legality.

Who said anything about ethics? Corporations accepting Bitcoin is evidence of its usefulness.

And by the logic you guys are espousing, then e-commerces don't accept any currency that isn't the one their government forces them to use either, because they do it through intermediaries like Visa.

>>Who said anything about ethics? Corporations accepting Bitcoin is evidence of its usefulness.

I don't buy that either. The only thing it is an evidence of is that said corporations want to attract customers of a specific demographic. Overstock.com CEO himself is a libertarian, for example. If it wasn't for him I strongly doubt they would have implemented Bitcoin payments on their site.

I mean, if Bitcoin is so useful, why have sites that have implemented it have done a miniscule if not virtually negligible amount of sales through it?

If a hammer is so useful, why don't everyone use it every day?

"They still accept Bitcoin, no scare quotes needed."

They accept fiat currency, not Bitcoin. The quotes were for accuracy, not "scare".

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