Microsoft Store No Longer Accepts Bitcoins As Payment (techtimes.com) 116
westlake writes: It may come as a surprise to many here [but not all! -- Ed.], but back in December 2014, Microsoft began accepting Bitcoin.as payments for apps, games, and music purchased through the Windows Store, for its Win 10, Windows Phone and Xbox customers. Big-ticket items like MS Office were excluded. The service has been quietly discontinued. Crypto-currencies may excite the geek, but the Windows Store is mass-market and middle class, and the interest just might not be there.
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My local mall has a Microsoft Store right across from an Apple Store. Microsoft Store was always empty, Apple Store was always full. Go figure.
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Apple brings people through their stores purposefully in their service model. They don't make disposable devices on lowest-bidder hardware. MSFT is largely old on such devices, so people aren't going to come there and make appointments at the genius bar or for service or whatever.
Apple has foot traffic in its stores every hour of the business day because they control the hardware end of things so they can plausibly answer any question in-store. Therefore, people go there for answers.
They also have built a v
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They also have built a very strong warranty model with AppleCare, they really do honor it without a fight so people are likely to purchase it, especially repeat purchase it if they've had a good experience before, and that brings people through the stores too.
I took in my 2006 MacBook into the Apple Store in 2012 to have the CPU fan and battery replaced. Despite being a "vintage" model and out of warranty, they were able to fix it. Due to a technician accidentally breaking a cable, they even replaced the keyboard/trackpad top. I got my MacBook back like it was brand new.
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I would not feel safe leaving my computer with a "technician" who accidentally breaks shit while they are trying to do a routine part replacement
Repairing a 2006 MacBook in 2012 (or even today) was not a routine repair. The technician made a mistake re-installing the keyboard/trackpad top by pinching a brittle plastic cable. Accident happens. The most important thing was that the MacBook got repaired.
For something as simple as a fan and battery replacement (or anything less than low level component repair), I would have just replaced them myself and saved a bunch of money/time.
Since I didn't have the time to do that, I had the money for someone else to do the repair for me.
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"I would not feel safe leaving my computer with a "technician" who accidentally breaks shit while they are trying to do a routine part replacement."
Yes, when something goes wrong with your Made In Chechnya laptop you can totally bring it to a Microsoft Store, have the CPU fan and battery replaced, and if the tech breaks something else in the process he will admit it and fix it for free.
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> MSFT is largely old [sic] on such devices,
I'd speculate that more Windows licenses get sold on more higher end computers than Apple will ever realize. It's probably the market leader on high-end computers that come with an operating system installed. The laptop that I'm using to type this has greater capacity than any Apple device ever made and Windows was an option when I bought it.
I could probably find the numbers somewhere but one of those sites that aggregates benchmarks should demonstrate it. Ther
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Will note though, to fulfill this years quota of nice things I'll say about Microsoft, that if you buy a PC from their store (or online store) it won't come with all of the 3rd party ad-ware that would come with the exact same model PC bought elsewhere. Will still come with the Microsoft ad-ware, but a vast improvement none the less.
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To get a top end Surfacebook and a top end Macbook Pro Retina you pay a premium price. Last I checked the Surfacebook was more expensive. When you buy the Macbook you have privacy. When you buy the Surfacebook you have MS adware/spyware/unstoppable telemetry tracking what you type and where you go etc. So at this point in the game with the security of OSX, and end user privacy (not an option in Windows any longer) Apple is no longer the overpriced arrogant choice. Now the better value for your money is t
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Actually I saw lots of people in both when I am at a mall with both stores.
I own a macbook pro and only went to the store once. My hard drive crashed and they told me that I needed a new drive.
I checked the drive using SMART and it said it was ok. I took it home and repartitioned and formatted the drive and it has worked just great for the last 3 years. Over all not impressed with the Apple store service.
The Microsoft store was okay but I just didn't see the point. I see little reason to go to an Apple or M
That's okay (Score:1)
I wouldn't trade Bitcoins for spyware anyway.
Mass-market? (Score:1)
How is the Microsoft Store "mass-market" or "middle class"?
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ChromeOS and Android are probably the worst examples you could have used, especially if you want to suggest that Linux is seeing any real adoption.
Both go out of their way to hide Linux as much as possible! They just go to show that the only way to make Linux even barely usable is to throw away the GNU utilities, X, GNOME, and the other software typically used by traditional Linux distros. Then all of that is replaced with quasi-proprietary (even if open source) alternatives which excel and abstracting away
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Sorry, the normal user is really only three steps above an ape banging rocks together.
Windows learned this a long time ago and dumb down the interface as well as hid all the underlying stuff. Linux is just late to the party. It is still Linux, sure the user interface is dumbed down to the point for a monkey could operate it.
As to 2 years old, I chose it because it was not the most recent article. Recently chrome books hit 51% market share in the education market and that is what all the current stuff is abo
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Most of these people in turn are part of the middle class, regardless of whether they're using Windows at home or on the job.
Well, if we are to accept this conclusion (and it is basically without any supporting evidence), the same could be said of all computer users and therefore all bitcoin users.
So what point is being made by calling Windows Store "middle class" is a mystery. The fact it is mass-market is a million times more relevant. It got discontinued because a tiny percentage of its targeted customers are interested in using bitcoins, not because bitcoins are your working classes money.
Let's wait until MS comes up with its own currency (Score:4, Funny)
I'm looking forward to clippycoin, the coin that is bound to the win32 API and windows kernel, you can only pay with it if you have microsoft windows.
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you can only pay with it if you have microsoft windows
People already pay in non-monetary ways every day if they have windows.
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"...and interest just might not be there..." (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's face it - one quick look at Microsoft's track record and you have to wonder why Microsoft would ever even think of touching Bitcoin. Bitcoin is (ostensibly) about privacy, surely this would be antithetical to Microsoft's demonstrated business practices to date? Then again, maybe Microsoft is only just realizing what a farce the concept of Bitcoin really is.
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The blockchain?
Proof of transfer of ownership of a digital item?
Electronic commerce?
A distributed ledger?
Or is it the non-fiat money part?
There's a lot to bitcoin. You sound like a someone in the 1990s who calls the internet a toy and that it would never be part of "real" business.
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Besides, all they had to do was to add something like BitPay to their list of accepted methods of payment. On their end, it's no different than PayPal.
"What is farcical about bitcoin?" (Score:2)
(Yes, I know - answering a question with a question is bad form - but there's nothing concrete about bitcoin anyhow, so it's okay)
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What government stands behind it?
Why do you think that matters? No government stange behind gold. Conversely, the government of a real country stood behind the famous Zimbabwe dollar.
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> Why do you think that matters? No government stange behind gold. Conversely, the government of a real country stood behind the famous Zimbabwe dollar.
It matters for practicality. One can reasonably expect a vendor to accept currency backed by a modern, secure, State. One can expect reasonable stability in a currency from a modern sustained State. One can reasonably expect that State to back that currency, which means that one can be reasonably sure that they'll get a similar value from it over an exten
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If I were the only one, I'd be a fool and the odd man out. I've looked around - I'm not the only one. There are a lot of us - even a lot among the geek crowd - who would prefer to have some rare substance and/or lots of guys with guns to assert that what I have is really money and not just a unique and interesting encrypted dataset.
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What is farcical about bitcoin?
1 -Its instability.
2- The gold-rush where wealth was distributed to speculative early adopter miners.
3- The schisms that seem to regularly threaten to tear it apart. Including the latest one which last I read was in a stalemate and bitcoin transaction times are now starting to get out of hand.
There's a lot to bitcoin.
Yes, there certainly is. But that doesn't make it any less farcical TODAY.
You sound like a someone in the 1990s who calls the internet a toy and that it would never be part of "real" business.
An analogy there might aptly compare Bitcoin to a single BBS a precursor to what came afterwards. After all, there are more crypto currencies th
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there are more crypto currencies than Bitcoin out there... and new ones being developed daily. 30 years from now, will anybody be using bitcoin? Or will it be a "compuserve"?
That's true and in 30 years "Bitcoin" may not be a dominant player and, like Netscape, may cease to exist. And yet it will have played an important role in the creation of the market. If a non-fiat cryptocurrency exists and is a major player 30 years from now then Bitcoin deserves a lions share of the credit. Bitcoin is much more than simply a currency. It's a proof of concept that went viral.
The blockchain works. One can have a distributed ledger; proof of transfer of digital assets; transfer of funds
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If a non-fiat cryptocurrency exists and is a major player 30 years from now then Bitcoin deserves a lions share of the credit. Bitcoin is much more than simply a currency. It's a proof of concept that went viral.
Sure thing, but that will not make bitcoin any less of a farce for actual transactions today.
The blockchain works. One can have a distributed ledger; proof of transfer of digital assets; transfer of funds quickly and easily with comparatively no overhead; one can have a digital wallet and bring funds around the world (if you've ever traveled abroad you'll recognize the usefulness).
One of bitcoins seemingly fatal shortcomings, as I see it, is that the wallets are MUCH too easy to steal. It has all this transparency and distributed leger to "prove transactions" but lacks any mechanism to prevent theft... and theft has been rampant. From MtGox and other exchanges being wiped clean, to wallet stealing malware going after individuals, etc. You can (rightfully) argue that this isn't a flaw of the bitcoin system and protocol per se... but it IS effectively a flaw of bitcoin in terms of the end user experience.
Re the gold rush mentality. Whatever. People get excited about many things for many reasons and gold rush fever is, to me, neither good nor bad.
I'm not bothered by people getting excited about it. I'm bothered by its early adopters and developers holding a large portion of the currency, essentially for 'free'.
"Here is this cryptocurrency, I just invented, and me and my friends printed ourselves thousands or millions of the finite number of coins before you even heard about it. You should all use it! Then our coins will be worth something and we get super rich off it." Frankly, that reeks... and is I think one of the reasons for the proliferation of cryptocurrencies... They reason..."Bitcoin mining is hard now, and why should bitcoin early adopters get all that free hoard? If new currencyX takes off and I'm in on the ground floor.... then I can get a free hoard for myself!"
THAT gold rush mentality is harming the entire model. Its not excitement about an "idea".
Now, the schisms- this is a problem. But there are always such problems even if there is a central authority.
Yet these schisms damage even neutral bitcoin user experience. When vocal MMO fans take to the forums to rail against a raid encounter script change or drop change or something, joe-rando can can still login and play and that tussle between players and developers is just background noise. Bitcoin schisms tend to paralyze or degrade the bitcoin network -- and transactions stop working properly.
Vendors are dropping bit coin right now, because the multi-minute processing times has made the currency difficult to use and unpleasant. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the trigger that motivated MS to turn it off.
They'd already built the code etc to support it... even if almost nobody was using it, it then has momentum just to stay the same -- someone has to actively take the steps to turn it off, publish updates, update FAQs etc, etc. Maybe processing delays were resulting repeated purchases or customer support costs or just negative feedback to the system? ...
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One of bitcoins seemingly fatal shortcomings, as I see it, is that the wallets are MUCH too easy to steal. It has all this transparency and distributed leger to "prove transactions" but lacks any mechanism to prevent theft... and theft has been rampant. From MtGox and other exchanges being wiped clean, to wallet stealing malware going after individuals, etc. You can (rightfully) argue that this isn't a flaw of the bitcoin system and protocol per se... but it IS effectively a flaw of bitcoin in terms of the end user experience.
Mt. Gox is less an issue of insecure wallets than insecure exchanges. (Whether due to incompetence or fraud on the part of the exchange's operators.)
I'm confident in my wallet being secure. I'm less confident that if I die that my wife would ever be able to recover the funds. There is a serious lack of usability in the altcoin world and that is a large part in the resistance to adoption. (Something quite similar to resistance to free software. - Another thread I've been part of here on slashdot).
"Here is this cryptocurrency, I just invented, and me and my friends printed ourselves thousands or millions of the finite number of coins before you even heard about it. You should all use it! T
Re the
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You've made a very interesting point. I don't share it. We all remember bitcoin in the early day when 12,000 bitcoin were used to buy a pizza.
Heh, yes; but at the same time you do hear about stupidly large wallets belonging to early insiders. And while they may have lacked some of prescience or even lacked the cynicism to think like this, I think its definitely a factor in all the new crypto currencies.
The delay in confirmation should not be an issue.
Customers aren't going to be happy about minutes or hours delay purchasing a $1-$5 app. Not when Visa et al take 3% of the sale and approve or deny in seconds.
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There are levels of concern. If you, as a vendor, were not concerned at all about double spending attacks then you wouldn't really care if confirmation came in 5 minutes or 50 minutes. But you (as a vendor) must be acutely aware of fraud and must protect yourself. Right now bitcoin is facing a growing pain. Does bitcoin continue being a one size fits all solution or does it focus upon larger transactions in which case there are fewer transaction and in which longer confirmations are of less i
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Exchanges are a vital part of any altcoin, particularly one newly distributed (and I'd say bitcoin is still at that stage). Most people are going to use altcoins as a way of transferring money, and most merchants are going to tie their altcoin prices to the prices in more conventional money, so there's going to be a lot of exchanging between altcoins and nat
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"Here is this cryptocurrency, I just invented, and me and my friends printed ourselves thousands or millions of the finite number of coins before you even heard about it. You should all use it! Then our coins will be worth something and we get super rich off it."
This single problem blows away the whole selling point of cryptocurrency, which is that the money supply is limited by mathematics rather than than being having to be monitored in real time by a central bank. It's as though the lucky insiders keep i
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Does Bitcoin get the credit or does DigiCash get it?
There are some big similarities with the two and some huge differences AND Chaum's DigiCash was a horrific failure but, like most things, BitCoin isn't really all that original a concept. I seem to recall that crypto.me has an interesting write-up but I'm way too lazy to go look for it. From there, you can dig into it a bit more but much of what Bitcoin does was in the lab many years ago. Some of it made it into the real world.
One of which did not make it
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Bitcoin definitely borrowed from DigiCash (and no I don't think Chaum == Satoshi either).
Bitcoin "borrowed" many ideas and combined them; as a proof of concept it worked; we're just now testing it's ability to adapt and grow in the "real" world.
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Uh, obviously interest is not there - or at least, Microsoft's interest apparently isn't there.
Let's face it - one quick look at Microsoft's track record and you have to wonder why Microsoft would ever even think of touching Bitcoin. Bitcoin is (ostensibly) about privacy, surely this would be antithetical to Microsoft's demonstrated business practices to date? Then again, maybe Microsoft is only just realizing what a farce the concept of Bitcoin really is.
Seems rather hilarious to me that the very operating system most targeted by ransomware on the planet is financially satisfied with Bitcoin payments to criminals. Perhaps Microsoft saw it as a conflict of interest.
"Dammit, if anybody is gonna rip off consumers running Windows, it better be us." - Overheard in the last Microsoft sales meeting regarding Bitcoin payments.
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Bitcoin is (ostensibly) about privacy
A system of money where every transaction exists on public record is about privacy? I don't think you really got the point of bitcoin.
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Why would M$ touch bitcoin, hmm, because they were paid to collect them and sell them to someone else. So who wanted a bunch of bitcoin to 'secretly' spend around the world, likely on a range of nefarious activities and could afford to pay M$ to collect bitcoins for them, hmm, who could afford to waste that money, hmm, what would they need that many bitcoins for? Just speculation but I would be interested to know what M$ spent those bitcoins on ;).
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Re:Hey buddy... (Score:4, Informative)
Right now, one bitcoin equals 413.16 USD. One satoshi is 0.00000001 bitcoin, so each satoshi is worth 0.0000041316 USD. That means you need 14522 satoshi to have 0.06 USD.
If each satoshi were worth 0.06 USD, that means one bitcoin would be worth six million USD and I'd be a multi-millionaire.
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Just a little while later, it is $413.61. An interesting thing I noticed, it's now on XE.com. However, that fluctuation isn't really a good thing I suspect. That's worth about 2/3 the value that mine were at when I donated them all to EFF.
People aren't going to want to deal with the immediacy required if it's an exchange of value unless that's smoothly done. In theory (perhaps in practice) you can end up having paid more (or less) than the product is worth due to just the time taken for the transaction to c
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Hey Buddy, I'd like to buy your software with my bitcoins, but the smallest coin I have is $413USD.... How the hell do you make change with the smallest integer amount of a bit coin is $413.16???? That is the problem with bitcoins... they can't be subdivided and there just aren't enough of them for each person on earth to have even ONE.
I mean there are so many flaws in the Bitcoin concept you really don't have to make new ones up that are obviously false...
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Or are you trolling?
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The satoshi is currently the smallest unit of the bitcoin currency recorded on the block chain. It is a one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). The unit has been named in collective homage to the original creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Why would you lie about BTC not being able to be subdivided? If you are just ignorant, then maybe you should go to Gizmodo and people won't call you out on such things.
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And guess which store is actually making billions of dollars, and which one is in the red?
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Good point. I'm sure both companies will change their policies based on your ever so insightful observation.
Stand up and salute (Score:3)
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Microsoft has, willingly or unwillingly as been a government "partner" since Windows 7 (perhaps earlier).
That or the impending catastrophic failure of the Bitcoin experiment... Perhaps they don't want to be caught up when the value collapses or the technical system breaks, both of which seem on the horizon.
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Quite the opposite in fact.
By the very nature of Bitcoin, it is impossible to hide a transaction. The only thing you can hide is the person behind a given address. By allowing small payment in BTC to a named account, Microsoft can deanonymize a few transactions.
No, I think the real reason they stopped using Bitcoin is much more down to earth. By allowing Bitcoin payment, they expected to get a few extra sales, turned out it wasn't worth the hassle, so they killed it. Another possibility is that they weren't
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"The US Government (like Russia) is against anything that protects anonymity". Tor was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
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Crypto-currencies may excite the geek (Score:2)
OK, can I at least pay with my own 3D printed coins then . . . ?
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You mean RepRap coins? They're only valid if you used ColorFabb GoldFill 3D printing filament.
No loss (Score:2)
Funny, I have some bitcoins and yet, I don't feel any loss here. Microsoft had a store? Really?
Other than OEM versions of the OS that many games insist I run, what would I ever give them money for?
MS Store is instant delivery, but BitCoin is not (Score:4, Insightful)
You will see this happening more and more, as the BitCoin network has dived in performance in recent weeks with transactions taking up to an hour to be written into the block chain - so you can't really run an "instant delivery" platform on that basis, as you have no guarantee of the transaction going through until its actually happened.
Either customers have to wait until the transaction is written into the block chain to actually get their purchase, or the vendor has to take a risk in giving the product before the transaction is set in stone, allowing for transaction reversal attacks. As most stuff on these type of stores are impulse purchases, or instant gratification purchases, most users will not want to wait out the block chain and will rather go elsewhere.
Now, yes MS does control a lot of these devices and thus can take the product back again (eg XBox games, Metro apps etc) but this just turns the whole thing into a PR nightmare issue, and doesn't stop users from purchasing music (which are not DRMed) on hacked accounts and reversing the transaction.
So, all in all, BitCoin currently doesn't work for these type of stores.
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It's funny how people keep saying transactions are being delayed, I use some faucets that can send withdrawals under five seconds.
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Good for you, I'm sure everyone else would love to know how they are accomplishing it (other than setting much higher mining rewards for the transaction) because this is a well documented issue.
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The current average mining fee for an average wait time of 12 minutes is a significant portion of a 99 cent purchase (as in, whole pennies), which only gets larger if you want it done quicker...
Meanwhile, a VISA transaction goes through instantly at a lower cost (comparing my current contracts VISA transaction cost vs the current BitCoin fee rates). This has nothing to do with being a cheapskate, and everything to do with the underlying system being the problem.
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Since you're comparing to Visa, you might prefer to use CoinBase.com to make BitCoiN-backed online money transfers instantly and cheaply. Both of them require trust in a third party and can be reversed after the fact, but are capable of an extremely high number of cheap transactions per second.
If you're thinking "but BitCoiN is supposed to be P2P and trustless!" then why would you compare it to Visa? It's more analogous to mailing someone a brick of gold.
I apologize if someone advertised BitCoiN to you as "
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CoinBase looks like another Mt Gox - it achieves its scaling because its not touching the BitCoin ledger, its purely doing exchanges through its own liquidity.
BitCoins current issues with scaling are completely down to the core developer team refusing to fix the issues - there are several ways the current problems can be resolved, they just don't want to solve them for some reason.
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THIS!
Legitimate retailers don't need the hassle. This transaction time issues have been known for some time, but you have competing parties on the solution. So we are at a stalemate. I believe the dispute between developer factions has been going on for over a year. Different factions have interests that are not always about what's best for the general user population.
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Congratulations, you're actually on topic!
Microsoft wants to do away with currencies altogether. Bitcoin is the competition. MS Credits works something like a frequent-flyer rewards program:
Joe builds an app, "Fart app in D Flat". In lieu of payment in $US, Joe opts to receive payment in app store credits. So each time someone buys Joe's app, he receives 100 app store credits, which Joe can then use to buy apps or ebooks, add to his music catalogue or rent movies etc.
The Windows Insider program dispenses st
Value of bitcoin (Score:1)
Its a problem with its image (Score:2)
Its not that there is no interest. Its more probable that because of all the recent CryptoLocker type attacks that seem to always want payment in bitcoin, as well as TV shows such as CSI: Cyber which have tarnished the image of bitcoin making it seem that it is only used by Malicious Hackers or Blackmailers.
Interest, but not tolerance for quirks (Score:2)
Also, as someone else noted the delays that are now more common in bitcoin payments are a bad match for software or license key downloads - it's almost like purchasing a software download by mail
Some of their own medcine perhaps... (Score:2)
Perhaps our friends at Microsoft got some of their own medicine when Visa/Mastercard said, "That's a lovely discounted merchant fee you have there. Would be a shame if something happened to it." They then "suggested" that accepting payment any other way might be detrimental.
Here's Chicken Little with today's headlines (Score:3)
The story [softpedia.com] has now been updated to read:
Microsoft has just confirmed that the update it made to the Windows Store FAQ page was just a mistake and that Windows 10 would continue to support Bitcoin.