Reddit Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Reddit Gold Purchases via Coinbase

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/reddit-starts-accepting-bitcoin-for-reddit-gold-purchases-thanks-to-partnership-with-coinbase/

by jerguismi • 13 years ago

115 51 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

SlipperySlope• 13 years ago

Like WordPress, this is great for the Bitcoin economy.

jere2• 13 years ago

Virtual goods like Reddit gold seem like an obvious opportunity to accept bitcoin. There's no marginal cost, so you don't have to worry so much about the price of BTC plummeting one day.

nwh• 13 years ago

The price is converted from USD and updated automatically. There's no risk from moving exchange rates.

jere2• 13 years ago

You're saying Reddit gets USD instantly? I guess coin base is the one taking the risk? Maybe I am misunderstanding.

malandrew• 13 years ago

The most obvious opportunity IMHO is a country with a country collapsing due to hyperinflation. Had Brazil suffered from inertial inflation today instead of the early 1990s, lots of people would have adopted BitCoin and the administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso would never have had to introduce the Unidade Real de Valor under the Plano Real.

There must be a startup opportunity in simply creating a system that can be rapidly introduced and be communicated from person to person virally in a country with a failing currency.

I'm curious it possible for someone, or some investment fund, with enough cash to distort some countries currency enough to destabilize it enough to get the citizens of that country to dump the destabilized currency in favor of BitCoin.

networked• 13 years ago

While Facebook wouldn't allow it on their site a social game accepting BTC for in-game purchases would be a great fit for this model, provided there's a significant overlap between people who play social games and people who use bitcoin. If that is not the case such a game could serve as a subversive tool to get people who are into social games into bitcoin or a double subversive tool to get people already into bitcoin into social games.

lcc_tn• 13 years ago

I will now get Reddit gold.

Protip for hopeful startups: there's a really, really good chance I'll pay you money (whatever your thing is), if you accept bitcoin payments. I personally want to see bitcoin be successful, and I'll go quite a ways to realize that wish in whatever small ways I can.

rdl• 13 years ago

What is the most expensive virtual good you'd purchase with bitcoin? Would you pay 100 bitcoins for a year of .com domain registration? :)

twodayslate• 13 years ago

100BTC = $2,715

nblaisdell2• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, what makes you want to see bitcoins be successful so much? A backend programmer I'm working with wants to include bitcoin payments in a site but I'm not convinced.

celticninja5• 13 years ago

why wouldn't you accept payment for soemthing? Taking payments in BTC is very easy there are a multitude of copy and paste code snippets that will do it for you. Unlike taking paypal or visa there are no hoops to jump through.

SCdF2• 13 years ago

So I have read a bit about Bitcoin, including actively trying to read primers and so on, but I think my utter lack of education around economics^ is really hindering my understanding.

Plainly: Why do I care about bitcoin? What does it have that other currencies (US, EU, my own NZD) doesn't have? Why should I put my money into it, and how do we know it will not collapse and make your fake wealth even more fake?

^To help calibrate your measurements, the part of The Economist that actually talked about the economy utterly confounds me. Edit: As another calibration, I had to google 'fiat currency' when someone brought it up below ;-)

javert6• 13 years ago

As a merchant, it could hypothetically be easier or cheaper to deal with Bitcoin than other currencies online. (For example, note how aggravating/risky PayPal is.)

As a person who wants to hedge against inflation or hyperinflation, it has a fixed total supply and can't be directly manipulated by the government (nor does its value depend on the government's credibility).

As a speculator, there is the _possibility_ of making huge profits if you go ahead and get in early.

As a person who is afraid of government power, it _could_ take away a lot of the government's power if widely adopted. (If everything is "cash," they can't really tax you accurately; and with Bitcoin, they can't just print more money.) It would be really nice if the US government had to choose between, say, multiple decade+ occupations in the Middle East vs. spending on other things.

As a regular spender, there is the _possibility_ of easy digital transactions with less overhead expense (e.g. swipe your smartphone to pay for something, _without_, say, VISA taking off the top... though probably it would be some bitcoin processor taking (less) off the top).

A different way of looking at it is: it's basically analogous to gold, except easy to transmit, but not impervious to apocalypse or regulatory action that would take down the Internet. Basically everything I said above is an implication of this way to look at it. People who are slightly bullish on gold ought to be extremely bullish about Bitcoin, IMO, if they have the technical understanding to believe that it works (I do, and it does).

MichaelApproved4• 13 years ago

"As a merchant, it could hypothetically be easier or cheaper to deal with Bitcoin than other currencies online. (For example, note how aggravating/risky PayPal is.)"

As a customer, I don't care about how aggravating/risky PayPal is to you. I also don't care that you have trouble with any other merchant account. I'm going to use the payment option that gives me the most protection and is most convenient to me. Credit card companies and PayPal allow me to dispute charges for unsatisfactory service. Even though I've rarely used that in my life, it's a huge reassurance!

As I understand it, Bitcoin is like a cash transaction with very little recourse for the customer. Once the transaction is complete, you can't reverse it (I'm still learning about it so please correct me if I'm wrong).

There could come a day when a middle man comes between the merchant and customer to give customer protection but then you're pretty much in the same boat as we are now.

Note: I'm also a merchant, so I know the pains of PayPal and merchant accounts. Just reminding you to look at it from the customer perspective.

hamidpalo• 13 years ago

As a merchant, it could hypothetically be easier or cheaper to deal with Bitcoin than other currencies online. (For example, note how aggravating/risky PayPal is.)

It's not. Given the volatility of bitcoin you're taking on a lot of currency risk since the value of the bitcoins you just got for your widget can change a lot in a few days. The extra cost of conversion and/or hedging is not worth it.

Especially when you consider all the other problems that bitcoin has.

oscilloscope• 13 years ago

Bitcoin is crypto-currency rather than fiat currency. It requires no central issuer, which means no entity can create swings in the total supply. It's based on computational limits which gradually increase the supply of Bitcoin at a predictable rate. With government-issued currencies, there is a pressure with USD to inflate the currency steadily over time, so your dollars lose value as you save them.

Right now, most people don't advocate investing significant amounts in Bitcoin. One use case is just to buy Bitcoin when you need it to complete a transaction.

You don't know that Bitcoin won't collapse. If you keep your Bitcoin on a service, you don't know that service won't get hacked. These are risks you should take into account.

But you also don't know how much demand for Bitcoin will grow. If if becomes widely used, people who saved them early should make quite a bit of money.

SCdF2• 13 years ago

> there is a pressure with USD to inflate the currency steadily over time, so your dollars lose value as you save them.

Why does that pressure exist? Simply because they print more money because it makes their lives easier?

charlesju2• 13 years ago

As a game developer, the best value of bitcoin is that it is a hack-resistant and durable way to exchange currency.

Gold is nice, but we can make gold someday or someone can discover a bunch of gold somewhere and it all goes down.

The government backed value is good, but governments are controlled by people and they can be corrupt.

Other forms of tangible value is ok, but it suffers from all sorts of various problems that make them generally less good than gold ie. less elementally stable, too fragile, too common, etc.

The way bitcoins works from my understanding is that:

1. Anyone can make a bitcoin if they find a pattern that matches a description of a bitcoin.

2. Bitcoins are traded publicly with ledgers distributed. If you trade your bitcoin 1075 to me, there will be a record of that transaction on several servers around the world. This concept is perhaps similar to bittorrent.

The benefits to these two basic principles are mostly that which javert has stated.

----

As a side note, there are a TON of services to get you started with bitcoin, today, for free. I feel that as a technologist, you should try it out.

1. Go to https://instawallet.org/ to get an address for others to send you bitcoins 2. Go to sites listed https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90718.0 and get some free bitcoins

----

Now, on a very personal note, I find bitcoins very interesting, but I don't believe it can reach its intended goals. Governments need to be able to track spending to tax and regulate. Bitcoins makes things like money laundering very easy. If bitcoin reaches any real scale it will be shut down, fast.

celticninja5• 13 years ago

how are you proposing they shut it down? the best they could do is shut down the exchanges, but goven they are located in the UK, Japan, France, US, Russia etc then you cant get them all shut down and even if you could you can still do person to person trades and I am willing to bet that a decentralised exchange appears not long after the current exchanges are shut down.

redthrowaway• 13 years ago

>the part of The Economist that actually talked about the economy utterly confounds me

Recognize that the Economist is a fairly left-leaning, certainly Keynesian publication when it comes to economics. There's nothing wrong with that, and they regularly publish informative pieces, but it isn't the non-partisan publication that it sometimes claims to be.

brianchu3• 13 years ago

How do you define "left-leaning"? In my view, The Economist is actually quite centrist, and to some extent right-leaning. For example, both the Democratic Party (US) and the Labour Party (UK) are left of The Economist on economic issues.

I also don't believe that most people reading the magazine could ever get the impression that The Economist claims (or appears) to be non-partisan. Every article reads like - and, in fact, more or less is - an editorial.

powertower• 13 years ago

If you are going to buy bitcoins, don't use BitInstant (at least not until they get their operation together).

Read the nightmare thread here were some people are filing police reports to get their money back, while others just give up -

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128314.980

It's the same story over and over every day without any change and the same effects.

Expez• 13 years ago

I bought some Bitcoins using MtGox about 4 months ago. The experience was pretty smooth. I had to send money to their bank in Japan and they credited my account. This increased the cost of aquiring bitcoins, because the bank also took a cut.

In general, I don't trust my wallet in the hands of strangers so I don't keep my bitcoins with MtGox. Instead I encrypted my wallet.dat with GnuPG and put copies of it in several locations.

Bitcoin Qt seems to be able to attach a passphrase to your wallet.dat as well, but I opted to go the manual route. I bought some bitcoins as an alternative to gold to balance my portfolio and hedge against inflation. In other words I plan to hold on to them for the forseeable future, so the inconvenience of dealing with the encryption manually is negligible.

TBCM• 13 years ago

Bitcoin adoption is increasing and reaching new businesses every day. The more people who get into this virtual currency, the better! For those who haven't joined the revolution yet, check out http://thebitcoinmaster.blogspot.com and get started!

Reddit Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Reddit Gold Purchases via Coinbase

Related Stories