![]() “Even if it’s just a small sale,” he said, “the curiosity of the transaction makes them use it.” The company makes the digital currency exchange and pays retailers in dollars.Īccording to Dominguez, most of Meltdown’s cryptocurrency visitors are “first-time bitcoiners” interested in learning. Rather than directly processing bitcoin, Dominguez uses BitPay to handle bitcoin transactions at his store. Since bitcoin’s not mainstream, business owners are a bit hesitant to start adopting it.”Ī new wave of bitcoin companies is making it easier for booksellers and other retailers to adopt the digital currency without fear of volatility, however. “It’s a very technical subject, the same way the internet was in the beginning. On the site, Beigel maintains a long list of retailers accepting bitcoin. “Bitcoin is still not very intuitive,” said Ofir Beigel, owner and editor of 99 Bitcoins, a reference site about the currency. One bitcoin expert compared booksellers’ slow adoption of bitcoin to the early days of the internet revolution. “I’m their most-visited BTM in Los Angeles.” “That’s a lot more than the company that installed it was expecting,” Dominguez added. The BTM gets more than 10 visitors every day. Created by the bitcoin trading company Coin Cloud, the machine allows customers to buy and sell bitcoin while shopping for comic books. Meltdown also installed a Coin Cloud Bitcoin ATM (or BTM for short) at the store, which generated a new stream of foot traffic. Even though bitcoin accounts for only “a handful” of transactions per month at his store, he sees bitcoin-related traffic as a “beautiful garden in which I can plant a Meltdown seed.” When Dominguez made what he said was the “mind-blowing” discovery of bitcoin, he wanted to prepare for the future of retail spending. Some experts see a bitcoin bubble, while others see an unstoppable new financial force. One year later, the exchange rate briefly increased to an astounding $3,014. During June 2016, the value of one bitcoin fluctuated between $450 and $750. Since there is a limited number of bitcoins in circulation and there is much speculation in this relatively new currency, the value of bitcoins has seesawed wildly. ![]() The transactions get recorded in the blockchain, a digital ledger maintained by the community of bitcoin users. When users spend bitcoins, the currency is passed from their wallets into the recipients’ wallets, without the help of a bank or other authority. Since bitcoin is so volatile, they’re afraid of losing what they just made.”īitcoin is a digital currency that can be stored inside each user’s digital wallet. I’ve spoken to a few booksellers and that’s what’s holding them back. Francisco Dominguez, the general manager at Meltdown who championed the bitcoin project, sees a simple explanation for this reluctance: “Fear. ![]()
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