Dell Starts Accepting Bitcoin 152
An anonymous reader writes: Mainstream retail companies have been slow to adopt Bitcoin, perhaps skeptical of its long-term value or unwilling to expend the effort required to put a payment system into place. Today, Bitcoin adoption got a momentum boost with Dell's announcement that it will accept Bitcoin as a payment method. Dell is by far the biggest company to start accepting Bitcoin. It's interesting to note that Dell, like many of the larger companies interacting with Bitcoin right now, is doing so through a third-party payment processor. On one hand, it's good — we don't necessarily want each company building their own implementation and possibly screwing it up. On the other hand, it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The bitcoin community is highly technical. They will probably sell a lot of systems making it available as an option. They will convert their bitcoin to cash instantly minimizing currency risk.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
The bitcoin community is highly technical. They will probably sell a lot of systems making it available as an option. They will convert their bitcoin to cash instantly minimizing currency risk.
I know a lot of highly technical people, and I don't know a single person that owns a single bitcoin... so I question your conclusions. I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.
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*teehee*
I can get you a good deal on some beanie babies.
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
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Ty Warner, the inventor of beanie babies, is worth $2.6 billion. Do not scoff at collectibles.
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Yeah, but he didn't buy any.
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Let me rephrase. There are some highly technical people in the bitcoin community. There are some not so technical people as well. There are many technical people not involved in bitcoin. It's a big world man.
No kidding (Score:1)
I think a more accurate description of the Bitcoin community would be "highly greedy" or "has a poor understanding of economics". I don't think technical has anything to do with it. In fact if you've some technical knowledge, some understanding of the size of the financial system, and then knowledge about the bitcoin protocol you quickly come to the realization that it has a deal breaker problem (it has several in fact) and that is that it can't scale to be the amazin' world wide currency the faithful want
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Just my cents...
Just my cents...
Bitcents or Dollar cents? There's potentially a $6.28 difference there.
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Who are you going to scam if you're the only one in a market? Yourself?
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Not to mention the ones working there.
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Sure, what with Dells being so popular with the highly technical community.
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Laptops are commodity items. Jaguars are popular with rich people. Some rich people drive crappy old Honda Civics. What's your point again?
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Citation?
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo... [forbes.com]
Quote from the article
"But what that analysis also told me was that 61 percent of people who earn $250,000 or more aren’t buying luxury brands at all. They’re buying the same Toyotas, Hondas and Fords as the rest of us. So what cars are preferred by the rich?"
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Still doesn't say anything about Civics. It just lists the brands, not the models. I'm guessing Accords at least. So, Prius and Camry over Varis and Mustangs and larger Fords over Fiestas.
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Maybe, but I am sure that is not what this is about. Dell is trying to get more business from members of the Bitcoin community who get all excited and extremely enthusiastic and start buying when a vendor starts accepting their coins.
In other words.... it's not about Bitcoin users being technical or not..... just a way to drum up some additional business for Dell, and to increase margins for some transactions, since banking fees will be much lower.
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Hey, I have a question about FPGA. I know almost nothing about them.
Can they be re-configured once the blocks are programmed? I don't know anything about processor design, but I'm curious if FPGAs are the kind of thing you configure once for a particular application and then that's it or if they can be reconfigured again later for another application.
See, I told you I don't know anything about these things. If it's a really stupid question, I'm apologize. I read a blurb about FPGA and was wondering.
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Can they be re-configured once the blocks are programmed? I don't know anything about processor design, but I'm curious if FPGAs are the kind of thing you configure once for a particular application and then that's it or if they can be reconfigured again later for another application.
The FPGA itself is empty every time it starts. On startup the hardware description is uploaded from a tiny external flash chip. This flash can be reconfigured arbitrary times. Actually, that is one of the strengths of FPGA: if there is a problem in the design or a new feature needs to be added, the customers can be served without rolling a new chip.
However, there are also some programmable logic devices which are designed to be programmed only once. The programming is usually done by using antifuses.
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I wouldn't totally agree with this. Dell occasionally has some huge markdown sales where you can get a PC for less than it would cost you to buy the parts and OS from Newegg.
Not actually accepting bitcoins. RTFA (Score:1, Insightful)
Dell is using coinbase to convert the bitcoins to dollars, because no large business in their right mind would store any real assets in bitcoins.
If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best (real money converted to bitcoins, bitcoins converted back to real money).
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If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best
"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services. So I guess dollars will never catch on either.
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The middleman being the federal government.
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Actual currency has a value that's generally standardized and stabilized by the output of the economy of the country and its value is backed by the government. For all its faults, fiat currency is way more stable over time than bitcoin and its derivatives.
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For all its faults, fiat currency is way more stable over time than bitcoin and its derivatives.
Are you seriously comparing the length of time most government currencies have been around to a virtual currency 5 years old?
Besides, government-backed currencies aren't immune to crashing. In particular, if the government thinks it's a good idea to create itself an enormous amount of new money, that currency will likely fail. (Something that doesn't happen with Bitcoin and derivatives because, by design, supply will be limited over time.)
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if the government thinks it's a good idea to create itself an enormous amount of new money, that currency will likely fail.
Not always. Central banks created huge amount of money to save banks after the subprime crisis, and it did not hurt the currencies. Economists tells us the increase of currency will not hurt when used during a depression, because it will not fuel prices increases.
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From what I'm seeing at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org], the Federal Reserve did appear to create a larger amount of money than normal during that period, but not on the scale I meant with "enormous". I was talking about doubling the money supply in a year or two (or worse).
I agree that inflation helps the economy by driving people to spend money instead of hoarding it. A little more inflation during a depression is needed to offset the effects of the depression. But that only works to a certain degree
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The ECB created 1 trillion euros within 2 months to save the banks, while 30 trillions euros existed. Tthis is a 1/30 increase, this is rather huge.
I agree with you about inflation, but we are very far from the point where USD or EUR are dumped for other currencies. We live the opposite excess, in fact.
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I never said they were immune to crashes, but I did say that the value of the money is based on the economic output of the country. So while the USD isn't backed by gold, it's backed by something much more valuable.
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Yeah no.
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"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services.
But people 'save' currency and plan retirements around quantities of it and such. Value fluctuations are real and troublesome of course, but in general this works. I give a company 30,000 dollars and they will keep it in an account for some non-trivial time and report their quarterly success in terms of those figures. They will at least talk about the value of currency in a manner that assumes pretty much absolute stability over 3 months and even project their expectations for how much money they will ge
Using bitcoins requires capital gain/loss calc ... (Score:3)
If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best
"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services. So I guess dollars will never catch on either.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well. However trading assets has a capital gain/loss tax implication in the U.S.
A recent IRS advisory said virtual currency is to be treated as an assent not a currency. So lets say you receive some bitcoins. At some future date you spend these bitcoins. Since these bitcoins are an asset you have to account for their gain or loss in value for the days that you held them and declare a loss or g
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No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well.
Where is the strawman you are arguing against that said the word "only"?
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"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well.
Where is the straw man you are arguing against that said the word "only"?
Currency is not **the** middleman, it is **a** middleman.
I'm not arguing against bitcoins. I'm pointing out that it is an asset in various legal jurisdictions and that this has huge implications that are only now coming to light.
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You totally missed the point of my post.
I don't know why you got hung up on the word "the", when the point was to refute the assertion that a middleman is worthless. I never said it was a currency middleman or an asset middleman... and I don't disagree with your analysis... but that makes no difference to my argument.
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As things stand now, there isn't an effective method for hedging BTC exposures, and you couldn't
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by your argument, dell selling computers in france and generating euros would be a sham because they then call their bank to convert to USD (their reporting currency) at some point.
If 'at some point' is 'when tax laws and reporting make it most effective' it is a bit different than 'at some point' being seconds after the sale, with quotes longer than 15 minutes being considered invalid.
Notably dell will announce products with MSRP in dollars, euros, pounds, etc. They will not do the same in BTC, they will instead do a just-in-time quote that is invalid about as quickly as they can get away with. There is no even vague assumption about BTC value from one hour to the next, unlike the
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Overstock is now keeping 10% of their bitcoin sales in bitcoin:
http://newsbtc.com/2014/05/02/patrick-byrne-overstock-com-10-percent-bitcoin-income-bitcoin/ [newsbtc.com]
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I just noticed a couple days ago that newegg.com is also accepting bitcoin. Not sure how long they've been doing that, but it made me wonder how many other places where. The list in TFS was a surprise to me.
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The two largest payment processors, Coinbase and BitPay, have about 65,000 merchants they accept bitcoin on behalf of and convert. The merchant gets local currency deposited to their accounts. There are an unknown number of places that take bitcoin directly, like our Seed Factory Project ( http://www.seed-factory.org/ [seed-factory.org] ).
You can spend bitcoin indirectly at many major merchants through Gyft ( http://www.gyft.com/buy-gift-c... [gyft.com] ). Note the "shop with bitcoin" item in the top menu. Gyft sells you a gift card
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They might be keeping 10k/mo in BTC, but they're doing under (but near) 0.1%, that's about 1M in sales in BTC a year.
That's not a joke.
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Except they never, ever have a BTC.
They don't do anything after the fact with them, because they never touch one.
They touch USD, transferred to them by their payment processor - and nothing else.
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Dell may be keeping 5% of their bitcoin payments as bitcoin. Or all of it. (Or none of it.) We don't know, and you shouldn't assume.
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Which is pretty much exactly what VISA does when I want to pay with my NOK in USD. I don't have to find an ATM, withdraw cash and deliver US bills and that's generally what we mean by "Do you accept VISA?". If I can hand over Bitcoins and they handle the conversion it means they accept Bitcoins. Just like you in some third world tourist destinations can pay with US dollars, they'll just keep it until they can exchange it for local money. Sure, it's not a native Bitcoin economy but it is on the way to using
Until dell can pay it's bills with Bitcoin.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Employee Wages and benefits
Suppliers
Taxes
Real Estate
Utilities
Most all of these things need cash. And even if they could be paid in bitcoin most companies wouldn't want to do that infrastructure themselves and would outsource it.
Until dell can pay it's bills with Bitcoin.... (Score:2)
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Large companies don't have the same kinds of issues small companies have. For one they're likely to do net exchange after they've paid off all expenses in that currency and large volumes get better rates very close to the interbank rate. I know my bank charges the interbank rate + 1.75% for foreign exchange, that's fine if we're talking about small sums but if I was buying say a $400,000 vacation home abroad I sure wouldn't be paying $7000 in fees. There are services that specialize in this, but the average
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True to a point, but if they receive in bitcoin and convert to Yuan directly to pay their suppliers then they may save a load in exchange and bank fees.
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Here's looking at you, Satoshi Nakamoto.
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People like Bill Gates are personally responsible for the absurd wealth disparity in this country.
But Bill only has a few tens of billions. Satoshi owns over 7% of the total number of BTC that will ever exist. If BTC become the world's primary currency, then the $240T in global wealth will be spread over the 21M total possible BTC, leaving Satoshi wealthy to the tune of $17T, or several orders of magnitude more wealthy than Bill (without even accounting for the expansion of the economy between n
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However, were BTC to achieve universal adoption as some sort of de facto global currency, it's not unreasonable to think that it would at least be possible for him to cash out (or rather, buy 7% of everything in the world) without totally destroying the BTC economy.
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US isn't seeing any of the benefits (yet) because it's a massive power that can borrow and print money willy-nilly, and the currency is mostly under control at the moment. But not all countries are like that. There are countries where something like Bitcoin can be a viable alternative to official currency, like Argentina [economist.com]. Bitcoin is flawed, but it guards against certain attacks that can be performed to a currency, in a way that is sometimes useful.
On the other hand, the way Dell accepts Bitcoin doesn't bear
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This. It's the the thing that the "it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters" crowd doesn't grasp. (One of the many things about how the real world works that many BTC fanboys don't grasp.)
it's (Score:1)
FYI. It's = It (i/ha)s.
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I don't see how that's flamebait, because the parent title is actually "Until dell can pay it is bills with Bitcoin"
And it's funny how he capitalized Bitcoin but not Dell.
Can I pay the tax in Bitcoins? (Score:2)
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No (Score:2)
You pay taxes in US Dollars in the US. You need to convert anything to that. Like if you sold a bunch of goods to someone in Europe and got paid in euros. No problem, and you can keep some of that in Euros if you like, but you need to sell some of those Euros to a bank (or other entity) and get dollars to pay the IRS. They only take dollars.
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Dell is using a payment processor, Coinbase, ( https://coinbase.com/ [coinbase.com] ) who accepts bitcoins on their behalf. Coinbase deposits dollars to Dell's bank account, and resells the coins to individuals, and on exchanges. So Dell never handles bitcoins themselves, just dollars like usual.
Fee-less? (Score:1)
it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin
Fee-less? Like the charges that all the credit card processors levy? ...or do you mean hidden fees that are just passed on to the customer?
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Slow shipping (Score:1)
You can bet every computer purchased through BitCoin is going to make a stop by the NSA. Buying a computer with untraceable currency AND having an interest in cryptography!? Either one alone would get you labelled an "extremist."
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I suspect it'll be a long time until it does.
Untraceable (Score:4, Informative)
I wish people would stop using the term untraceable when talking about those crypto-currencies, because the blockchain will forever hold every single transaction it has ever processed. It's the complete opposite of untraceable.
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... the blockchain will forever hold every single transaction it has ever processed. It's the complete opposite of untraceable.
That depends on what you're trying to trace. While it's true that the transactions themselves are public knowledge, they don't include any personally identifiable information. Tracing the movement of bitcoins through a series of single-use addresses on the blockchain is easy; tracing the changes in real-world ownership is an entirely different matter. Unlike money moving through a series of bank accounts, there is no central entity to tell you who controls each address.
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does a $100 bill hold any "personally identifiable information" barring some trace DNA or fingerprints?
Every bill has a unique identifier on it. Every time you withdraw from an ATM, those IDs are associated with your real name. Every time you purchase something, the retailer deposits those bills right back in a bank. Occasionally, bills may be passed around privately before landing in a retailer's hands, but this actually enables data miners to determine with whom you financially associate. Cash is no panacea of privacy.
Imagine a graph in which accounts are the nodes and transactions are the edges. Cash t
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It's not really accepting Bitcoin any more than (Score:2)
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By your reasoning, Dell doesn't accept credit cards either.
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By your reasoning, Dell doesn't accept credit cards either.
Credit cards don't claim to be currency either, nor does the company accepting it have to worry they'll be able to turn the receivables into cash. Bitcoin, however,is not s liquid so if Dell accepted Bitcoin they could be stuck with a large stash that is not easy to turn into cash. Credit cards also let you make large purchases, depending on your credit limit. A million dollar Bitcoin buy may be much more difficult since the processor is assuming all the risk while giving out cash with no assurance stye Bit
No Doge? Much sad. (Score:2)
How much is that computer? Three billion Doge!
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Dumb (Score:2)
it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters.
This is a dumb complaint. Even if you think Bitcoin is great, there's no way it's going to do away with financial middlemen and transaction fees. Those things exist for too many different reasons. And even the fees it will eventually do away with, there would have to be some intermediate state between now and then, where businesses rely on some other business to deal with the processing of Bitcoin transactions, since Bitcoin hasn't become accepted as real currency yet.
Oh yes, I know, I'm going to get a
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If I can pay my bills or buy something with Bitcoin, it's the exception and not the rule
That's a low bar to set. If you can get a price or invoice in BTC that gives you a month to pay it off, then I'll start considering it a viable 'currency'. Accepting bitcoin with just-in-time pricing is very low risk and it's cheap for a company to do that for publicity with no downside. A company need not believe in bitcoin in all to do it. A company believes in bitcoin if it will commit to a long term price for anything it supplies or purchases.
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It's not really 'credit' in that time frame. We are talking about simple price stability. Having 30 days to pay your metered electric bill is not really credit, it's just allowing for reasonable delay on the part of the billed individual for the logistics of allocated and spending money. post-paid metered stuff works like that all the time. If post-paid really bothers you, then wait until a product announce is willing to state MSRP in BTC.
I always come here for the gnashing of teeth (Score:1)
Well, now Dell takes bitcoin. Don't you think maybe you should read up a little about how this newfangled Public Key Cryptography works? These damn kids and their goddamn bubbles. Shoulda bought when it was $50 last year, you'd be paying off your house...
But now it's over $600!!!!!! NO WAY are you go
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Well said. There was the same kind of negativity back in the 90's when the internet as a whole was taking off. The ones who missed out gradually turn from whining to reluctantly adopting, then it went mainstream like it was perfectly natural from the get-go.
The same will happen with digital currency. The mentality is not unlike the stock market. The ones who whine the most are the ones who didn't expend the effort to understand stuff early and therefore missed out. It's happened before and will happen
Re: I always come here for the gnashing of teeth (Score:2)
You are correct, though. Perhaps it is just wierd because this particular technology moves much faster than many, and its very nature is an affront to certain well-cherished white elephants.
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No one likes to admit they're wrong, and the more strongly you've committed to a position, the stupider you'll feel when the evidence becomes undeniable. That's why, at some point, it always stops being about issues and starts being about persons: people are not defending their position anymore, they're defending themselves. It's one of the more annoying failure modes o
Re: I always come here for the gnashing of teeth (Score:2)
Also, when buying from reputable vendors, it is very nice not to have to worry about credit card information being stolen.
It is also super easy to send money to my brother, just through a Skype call, directly to his phone.
Plus when I hold bitcoin I can be certain that my bank isn't going to suddenly start charging a maintenance fee on it.
If Bitcoin isn't for you, that is completely OK. There is plenty of room in the world
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Breath buddy
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And after you have taken that breath. Breathe. :-P
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Bullshit. I was talking about adopting critical mass by the general population, not wall street.
In 95 when Netscape was climbing there was nothing but negativity. The media was saturated with stuff like what's the internet good for, the stock price is absurd, browsers are clunky and crash all the time, any search engine was limited to a small set of sites (rings), usenet is a haven for porn/bins, I'd never trust putting my credit card in a browser. Probably another 10 things on top of that.
Even Ebay was
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Because, as is made clear in the summary, Dell does not accept BitCoin, they only accept USD.
A third-party payment processor gives Dell USD on your behalf, the same sort of USD Dell gets when their payment processor accepts a credit card.
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- except for the "no inflation"
I don't think anyone can claim that bitcoin cannot have inflation. It has hyperinflation and hyperdeflation in pretty frequent intervals.
They can claim that the inflation/deflation is not within the reach of government manipulation, but it definitely does happen in very chaotic unpredictable ways. One's tinfoil hat has to be on very tight to see that as an improvement.
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I don't think anyone can claim that bitcoin cannot have inflation. It has hyperinflation and hyperdeflation in pretty frequent intervals.
Bitcoin has an extremely predictable rate of supply inflation (the kind meant here) which follows an exponential decay curve and will be under 1%/yr. by 2020 or so. There could be some very minor supply deflation after that point due to people losing their keys, but it should never become a major factor.
The price inflation and deflation you allude to is partly due to being a very young high-risk/high-reward venture. If Bitcoin is to reach even a fraction of its potential as a currency, the price per bitcoin