Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

http://promotions.newegg.com/nepro/14-3540/index.html

by mrb • 12 years ago

377 202 12 years ago

promotions.newegg.com

sanswork27• 12 years ago

Pay 1% more(or 3%-8% more if you have a cash back card and depending on where you bought your coins) to save them 2% and lose all consumer protections in the deal.

It's no wonder there is almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world while new merchants are announced every other day.

mrb12• 12 years ago

You are wrong, there is tremendous consumer growth happening. The two biggest US processors (BitPay and Coinbase) release numbers every once in a while. One example:

"Since [...] October, along with the integration with Shopify in November, [...] the transaction volume has tripled." Source: http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/11/bitpay-exceeds-100-000-000...

sanswork27• 12 years ago

Where are you seeing it? Overstock the most regularly promoted name as a retailer has only seen dropping numbers since they started.

Notice bitpay stopped reporting 7 months ago?

Coinbase has also been called out on posting contradictory numbers on their blog posts in the past which lead to them deleting most of their posts related to numbers.

aquadrop• 12 years ago

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

I don't see any growth. Also, 70k transactions/day - one average shopping mall.

lomocotive• 12 years ago

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

this looks like a typical exponential curve to me

kaonashi• 12 years ago

Transaction volume and consumer growth aren't even close to the same thing.

asdfaoeu• 12 years ago

True there's no advantage to paying with bitcoin currently and most people are just using it for the novelty value. But enough growth and merchants will just have to offer discounts with bitcoin purchases to stay competitive.

StavrosK• 12 years ago

Isn't that illegal?

mrb12• 12 years ago

If the numerous and massive data breaches, and subsequent credit card theft and fraud events of the last few years have taught us anything, it is that yes paying in bitcoins has one fundamental advantage: you are never handing the store your full billing info which can be stolen and reused by fraudsters.

Now, Bitcoin also has its own security challenges (eg. how to secure a wallet), but there are solutions (hardware wallets) making it a fundamentally more secure way of transacting online.

aianus7• 12 years ago

That's not true, it's cheaper for me to buy things on Amazon with Bitcoin via Gyft (3% cashback) than using my credit card (1% cashback) or debit card (nada).

sfjailbird3• 12 years ago

lose all consumer protections

Nonsense. Consumer protection laws apply no matter the payment method.

Nursie9• 12 years ago

Not true in all places.

In the UK part of your protection is the fact that there is a third party involved (your credit card issuer) who has a variety of responsibilities to the consumer over and above the responsibilities of the retailer. In practice this means you get better protection as the money can be taken back from the retailer by a third party with a big stick.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

Yes I meant payment system features and reversibility without having to go to court(if its even an option for you on international orders).

lsc• 12 years ago

"Consumer protections" - not "Consumer protection laws" - All of the "consumer protections" I have actively used were given to me not by law, but by the credit card company. (some of those are mandated by law, of course.)

Of course, I have been passively protected by consumer protection laws, and yes, I would receive the same passive protections when paying via cash or bitcoin.... but when those laws are violated, it's almost never worth it to bring up a legal case. If I pay cash, and I get screwed, I complain to the vendor. However, if the vendor does not give me satisfaction, it's usually just not worth paying a lawyer.

It /is/ however, often worth it for me to call my credit card and get them to take the charge off.

While the credit card might not get me many (or any) more legal rights, it certainly gives me rather a lot more practical power if I have a dispute with a retailer (vs. using cash or bitcoin)

user246• 12 years ago

almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world

There are quite a few metrics on http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/ that seem to indicate otherwise.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

Which ones? The number of accounts on a website? The number of transactions is flat as is the transaction volume.

oleganza2• 12 years ago

Paying in Bitcoin makes a lot of sense:

1) You don't have to provide private info like CC number.

2) If you bought bitcoins at X and now they are valued at 10X you may effectively enjoy 90% discount on all purchases.

All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC details got stolen and used by someone else. Of course, bitcoin payments do not leak your private keys, so the entire class of problems goes away.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

1) You're ordering something to be delivered you have to provide the same info.

2) True, but now once you've spent them does it make sense to buy them back and do it again?

Because most companies are afraid of chargebacks and will take steps to avoid them. Bitcoin payments don't but any minor lapse in personal computer security likely will.

pathy2• 12 years ago

For 2), surely you would have to pay capital gains tax on the increase in value. To be fully compliant with the law, it may be hard to enforce in reality.

chrismorgan• 12 years ago

And if you bought bitcoin at 10X and they are now valued at X you may effectively enjoy paying 1000% of asking price on all purchases.

lazzlazzlazz• 12 years ago

And if you bought Bitcoins at X and now they're valued at .1X... now what? A revolutionary new way to gamble on the price of an online purchase?

maxerickson• 12 years ago

A credit card number is vaguely sensitive. It certainly isn't meaningfully private. A home address is similar, except it is less sensitive.

Nursie9• 12 years ago

> All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC details got stolen and used by someone else.

Companies who don't care about brand and companies who have not yet established a brand are, however, somewhat indistinguishable.

The chargeback facility (among others) provides a cushion and safety net to allow consumers to transact in cases where they are less than 100% certain who they are dealing with.

Removing it would kill the ability of smaller businesses to transact as people like me would never give them any cash, and I would advise my non-technical friends and family to behave similarly.

I know this disagrees with your view on the world, sorry.

soup10• 12 years ago

Bitcoin is still mostly a speculative vehicle. 9/10 links about bitcoin are not real news and are just propped up by people with a stake in it. Nobody else cares.

aianus7• 12 years ago

To be honest, for some merchants (Amazon) I really don't need my credit card protections and I'd rather get the 2% back.

xur172• 12 years ago

I wonder this too - I rarely use cash right now, because I get:

1) Cashback (1-3%)

2) Chargebacks if needed

by using a credit card. Bitcoins are basically like cash in my mind - very easy to move around, but no protections in case of it being stolen, and no cashback. I think Bitcoin is very neat technology, and has some useful features (transferring money between people quickly and easily with basically no fees), but I fail to see the incentive for me to use it to replace my credit card. The business receiving it receives all of the benefits.

If stores passed the savings onto the consumer with 2 or 3% cashback, I could potentially see people using it. Especially if this was returned as points or something, similar to how it's treated for credit cards.

coldpie• 12 years ago

Please consider using cash at small and local businesses when possible. You pay the same amount either way, and the extra 2-3% goes to the local business instead of to Visa.

Additionally, I've been to one or two stores that will actually give a small discount on cash purchases. I hope that trend continues.

melvinmt• 12 years ago

I'm wondering why Coinbase doesn't offer a cashback program where they would charge the merchant the typical 2-3% and pass it on to the payer as a discount. This would hugely incentivize paying with BTC. The merchant should be indifferent about this fee since he has to pay it already 95% of the time.

walden42• 12 years ago

I don't need consumer protection at Newegg. I don't know anyone that's ever had an issue with them.

NSEDhom5• 12 years ago

Agreed. I've had to return things, replace damaged shipments, etc. Newegg has always been extremely helpful. I guess dishonest people can't imagine a scenario where merchants behave that way to, I don't know, retain customers instead of being forced to because their payments are being held hostage.

Nursie9• 12 years ago

LOL.

Until one day it all goes wrong, or management change and don't care about service so much.

And that also acts as a barrier for new entrants into the market, stifling competition. When you have to just trust that a new market entrant won't run off with your cash, why would you ever risk it?

There's a hell of a lot that consumer protections and existing payment instruments give us.

wyager• 12 years ago

lose all consumer protections in the deal.

Well I don't care about the ability to do chargebacks from newegg, and I care a lot about the ability to not get my financials stolen by hackers, so the "consumer protection" Bitcoin offers here looks pretty good to me.

awt• 12 years ago

You should try paying for something with BTC once, just for fun.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

I have. I've been interested in bitcoin for years now. But my interest doesn't translate to me thinking it will be successful as a consumer tool.

BenC88• 12 years ago

Could somebody explain the reasoning behind "customers have 15 minutes to complete their bitcoin payment before their invoice expires"

dingdingdang• 12 years ago

Taking into account the potential for extreme value fluctuation seems a reasonable guess to me.

comboy3• 12 years ago

It's something normal among bitcoin payment processors because of high price volatality (you could start a payment and only finish it if the bitcoin value goes down).

nly2• 12 years ago

Bitcoin is decentralised, so, from Neweggs perspective, the transaction is never completed 'online'. Their payment processor (I'm guessing it's going to be Bitpay) has to wait until they see your transaction on the Bitcoin network before they tell Newegg that it's paid. Think of it as waiting for a cheque to arrive. A timeout is just sensible so you're not reserving stock.

beaner• 12 years ago

That's not what the timer is referring to. The 15 minute timer is in place due to the exchange rate. Newegg prices their items in dollars, BitPay converts it to a BTC price and presents that price to the user. They can't show that same BTC price forever, becasue if the price of bitcoin drops by 50% over 24 hours, and you decide to leave your window open and order then instead of now, you will get whatever you are buying for half the price. Bitpay guaranteed the USD price that was set on the item to the merchant. Now they owe it, but have only collected half. Thus Bitpay would be out hundreds of dollars (or whatever half your order is). Similarly, if the price rose by 100% over 24 hours you could accidentally pay double. So they put a timer on it.

tuntematon2• 12 years ago

I'd say it's because bitcoin transactions are not instant. To fully 'verify' that a transaction has taken place, they need 6 confirmations. The transaction may within a few seconds show up on the bitcoin blockchain, but it can't be fully trusted until it has at least 6 confirmations. Waiting for that can take some time.

nly2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure Bitcoin payment processors like Bitpay aren't waiting for 6 full confirmations.

twodayslate• 12 years ago

This seems pretty huge for Bitcoin. Newegg sells much more than computer parts now. Glad to see that Newegg is headed back more to their roots though

gcb02• 12 years ago

i would rather see they dump the crappy products that now dominates their catalog and amazon's.

the world does not need yet another 500 models of USB powered ventilators.

sillysaurus34• 12 years ago

Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves?

This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving. Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't make them learn a labyrinthian set of rules, or worry about what's dangerous or what isn't. Protect consumers, and bitcoin adoption will follow. Large-scale bitcoin adoption can't occur until bitcoin is made safe.

Did you hear about the guy who took his macbook into an Apple store for some routine repairs, and one of their employees made off with his 15 BTC? The employee hooked his harddrive up to a different computer, scanned it for a "wallet.dat" file, saw it was unencrypted, and robbed him. Was it dumb of this customer not to be using encryption? Yes. On the other hand, was it dumb of him to be storing so much wealth in bitcoin right now, given how easy it is to lose your money? Objectively, yes.

This isn't an insurmountable problem, but people have to start working on it in order to solve it.

runeks3• 12 years ago

I think hardware wallets (like the Trezor), or smartphones with a TPM module is the solution.

This will take time, however (the latter more than the former).

The reason it will take time is that the concept of storing your own money digitally, like is the case with Bitcoin, is an entirely new concept that software and hardware needs to adapt to. With all other solutions (VISA, PayPal, bank wires), you're asking someone else to transfer your money, with Bitcoin you're doing it yourself. Basically, each user needs a greater level of security than PayPal, VISA and banks have internally, since Bitcoin payments are generally irreversible after an hour or so (and often much sooner).

This isn't something that is done overnight, and people have started working on it, but it takes time to, first of all, develop the hardware, and, second of all, develop and implement the interface between the hardware wallet and the actual payment request (ie. when I arrive at a BitPay invoice payment page, how do I pay using my hardware wallet?).

ogig• 12 years ago

There is people working on that issue. For example Trezor is an easy to use bitcoin safe. I think it's headed in the right direction: http://www.bitcointrezor.com/

swimfar• 12 years ago

Here's the Bitcoin theft reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233230

user246• 12 years ago

So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves?

Given the huge amount of developer interest, I'd be pretty surprised if several groups of smart people aren't kept awake at night by their awesome ideas about how to fix this.

mcherm• 12 years ago

Your question doesn't make sense to me.

when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves?

As you point out in your own statement, there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase and they are an excellent example of a company doing that well and being quite successful at it.

You apparently reject them because working with Coinbase requires the customer to "trust their coins to a third party service". Trusting the third party service is pretty much mandatory for using ANY third party service. Imagine a hypothetical service that provided "turnkey" software to store wallets on your own computer -- you would still need to fully trust the provider of this service to ensure that they actually stored the money rather than siphoning it off someplace else.

The only way to (mostly) avoid having to trust a third party is to avoid using a "turnkey" solution that is fully packaged without user serviceable parts. You would instead need to learn on your own how to safely store the coins yourself. Which is ALSO a choice, and many people do it. You complain that it takes "a solid week" to learn how to do this -- and indeed, it does take a few days to become an expert on any subject; there are 10 minute tutorials, but I presume you (rightfully) reject them as being insufficient to really teach a user enough to be fully safe.

Honestly, I think that you are just being unreasonable in your expectations.

sillysaurus34• 12 years ago

there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase and they are an excellent example of a company doing that well and being quite successful at it.

And if Coinbase goes bankrupt, all their users lose all their money.

I've written about this extensively several times before, so I won't rehash the old points. But the summary is, if you trust your money to an entity that doesn't have insurance, you're being very, very brave. Coinbase can go bankrupt for a multitude of reasons, some of which aren't fair.

One could counter this with, "Don't store very much money in Coinbase." Sure, but then consumers don't have much money on hand to buy things on a whim, which reduces consumer adoption. That's why I've been saying: Make bitcoin safe, and adoption will follow.

jliptzin• 12 years ago

You could use multisig transactions so that you don't put your trust centrally in one third party service, for example you could trust three independent services to each hold a private key, that way 2/3 would have to be compromised at the same time in order to for something bad to happen. For more robust security you could add services and need 3/5, 6/10, etc. I'm not sure of the exact implementation details, but in theory I think that would be one solution.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Theory

flatline• 12 years ago

Your question doesn't make sense to me.

It is because you don't understand the nature of bitcoin or it's colorful history with third party services like Coinbase. The question is a good one and not at all unreasonable if you understand bitcoin. The system is supposed to be trustless, and one aspect of this is that you don't need a trusted third party to conduct safe and fast transactions with another individual. Another aspect is that you don't have to trust someone else to hold your money, but then of course the security is up to you, which has so far been something of a problem.

As others have mentioned, multi-sig addresses are one part of the solution (doesn't BitGo support these now?), and another is potentially a hardware solution. But the current Coinbase offerings are inadequate, and those types of solutions will eventually be replaced or people will continue to lose their money when they trust someone else with their private keys.

There is no insurance for stolen, hacked, or otherwise lost keys. In the banking system, when money is "lost", the loss is spread out among everyone, which is nice if you were the affected party but is a pretty raw deal for everyone else (cf. banking crisis of the past 5+ years). When bitcoins are lost, there is no recourse.

ThomPete2• 12 years ago

A lot of people are missing the point with these large sellars accepting bitcoin. It's not that they expect sales to explode but rather they want to experiment and get a feel for how it works.

There will be a time where crypto-currency will be as normal as paying with credit card or cash.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

Or they see overstock getting a lot of press out of it and want on board.

pistle• 12 years ago

Coinbase and BitPay signing up new retailers doesn't provide me additional belief that bitcoin is viable. The retailer doesn't believe in bitcoin. They get cash out ASAP.

For a retailer, if they think they can move units by partnering with someone who will convert BC to cash, sure whatever. It's like adding PayPal.

You don't see the 10,000,000 new consumers bought bitcoins!!! Who knew cryptocurrency could burn holes in pockets!??!?! articles because that's not happening.

The real problem was never "people don't have a place to spend bitcoin." It was "people don't have time or risk tolerance to manage bitcoin."

jafaku2• 12 years ago

Every time Bitcoin makes a first step, haters will ask "but where is the second step?".

By the way, Overstock is now holding bitcoins (about 3% of their Bitcoin sales). I wouldn't be surprised if Newegg did the same after some time.

blhack4• 12 years ago

Reading these comments is depressing. Bitcoin isn't a few geeks trading bits over IRC anymore, guys.

To some of the common bitcoin concerns:

1) They're easy to steal! Look at this person who did $something_stupid and had all their coins stolen!

Yeah, sure...and if you had left $10,000 in cash just sitting on your table, the same thief could have stolen that as well. There are stories every single day of people having cash stolen from them. The people keeping that much value stored on their local machine are usually pretty crazy bitcoin evangelicals. These are not normal people who bought some coins on coinbase.

2) It doesn't do $things_credit_cards_do!

No, it doesn't! What you people seem to be missing is that it's a totally new way of transferring value. It has its own quirks, requires its own security models, etc. It also does $things_credit_cards_dont_do! That's why people have an interest in it!

EthanHeilman• 12 years ago

It doesn't do $things_credit_cards_do!

Boats are totally useless they only travel on water. Why would anyone prefer a boat to a truck for moving freight?

pauletienney• 12 years ago

I do agree. However, i feel there won't be strong adoption without a great advantage for customers.

laichzeit0• 12 years ago

Let's see. I could pay for hardcore online pornography in a pretty anonymous way. I could board a flight with a flash drive containing $1million dollars in BTC. I don't have any draconian restrictions on who I can and can't exchange my "money" with. If you send me BTC and the network confirms I never have to worry about your cheque "bouncing". I could donate to Wikileaks without a company like MasterCard or Visa deciding who I can and can't send my money to.

I can do all these things on my own without having some third party potentially fucking me over or charging me a monthly fee. I consider all these things great advantages.

It also doesn't mean I need to abandon credit cards or other forms of value transfer. But in those cases I now have an alternative I did not have had BTC not existed. It's a weird black and white kind of logic that HN has where it seems for Bitcoin to succeed it must replace everything currently in use. That's a false dichotomy. They can mutually coexist. Right tool for the job.

foobarqux3• 12 years ago

Why would a consumer use it over a credit card? Especially when you need to use a credit card or other payment method to buy the bitcoin in the first place?

Nakatomi_Plaza• 12 years ago

Some don't, like everybody who posts on the mining forums of bitcointalk.org and is generating their own coins, or converting alternative coins to bitcoin. All these miners want computer hardware, makes sense to directly market to them.

sanswork27• 12 years ago

1) What are the best practises for having a bunch of bitcoin? You say you shouldn't keep it stored on your local machine but where? Keeping it stored on exchanges is kind of prone to failure in the bitcoin world. If you want to use a cold wallet you need a second computer that you don't plan to use for anything else and you need to learn linux or its pointless

2) Just because its new doesn't mean its better or makes more sense than the existing methods.

neomindryan• 12 years ago

1) Try this? https://www.bitgo.com

blhack4• 12 years ago

1) Store it on coinbase. And don't invest your life savings into bitcoin in the same way that you might not want to "invest" your life savings into Western Union Travelers Checks.

2) What is a way that I can transfer value to somebody in a far away place that is easier (if both parties already accept coins) than bitcoin?

vijayboyapati• 12 years ago

There are a number of technological solutions to the security issues related to storage. BIP38 and multisig are both very promising innovations, and there will be more. We're really at the very early stages of Bitcoin's development. Think 1994 for the Internet.

recycleme• 12 years ago

1) look up paper wallets.

bitcoin is at a stage where it's not trivial to secure if you are not a technical person. There are companies that are working at making this easier by providing the security and even insuring the bitcoins if something happens. When services like this are out we will see a huge turning point IMO.

HackerClues• 12 years ago

You can just store it on a usb...

dombah• 12 years ago

1) Best practice is typically separating it into "savings account"/ personal wallet. So cold storage and a hot/low security wallet.

2) Agreed. There are no guarantees, however strong indicators it will improve. Remember e-commerce didn't make sense either back in the day (no salesperson, can't touch goods, security - all “rational” reasons) -- but all solved.

On that point I don't even view BTC as currency actually (my personal view).

It is first of it's kind with no precedent (is it currency, asset, ledger, protocol…?). Is it all of above? Or something else? Reminds me of when first iPad came out and people just viewed it as a “large iPhone” (true, in some ways - but it’s definitely not defined that way anymore. It’s own unique category now. Public aware of nuances). No precedent. Still defining by analogy to old paradigms.

BTC is similarly nuanced. I actually view it as more buying a stock in protocol. Yup sounds crazy/doesn't make sense using old paradigms. But I’ll leave that for another post (the gist of the idea is here: http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/).

h1karu• 12 years ago

1.) best practice is to store it in a paper wallet.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet

superuser22• 12 years ago

What are the best practises for having a bunch of bitcoin?

Given that it's designed as a digital replacement for cash (not savings and checking accounts - cash), keeping more than a few hundred dollars around at a time would seem to be as advisable as storing the equivalent $100 bills, with the same level of extraordinary security measures needed.

throwaway5752• 12 years ago

Newegg itself is not accepting Bitcoin, it is not keeping a balance in Bitcoin, and it has no exposure to Bitcoin related risk.

It has a payment processor, Bitpay, that accepts Bitcoin. As long as you have a competent engineer on staff, it's about as difficult as accepting PayPal.

It's nice that this is happening, but the headline should be, "BitPay lands Newegg as client". The maturity of the services around Bitcoin helps everyone that holds them, so it's not unimportant. It's just a very, very far stretch from a merchant directly accepting and holding a currency balance in BC.

aroch• 12 years ago

it's about as difficult as accepting PayPal

Hah! Bitpay fails often, and it fails in mysterious ways. Manual intervention on up to 10% of payments is no beuno.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

Pretty amazing - I went and made a purchase on NewEgg using CoinPocket on my iphone - total time for transaction was under 10 seconds, including the time to scan the QR code, click send, and have Newegg recognize I'd sent payment.

CoinPocket / NewEgg were within $0.15 of their exchange amounts on a $31.89 purchase. So, CoinPocket thought it was $31.89 that I was sending, and NewEgg thought I was sending $31.74.

All in All - Bitcoin made purchasing a lot more easy than having to type in a Credit Card number or login to Paypal.

Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

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