Bitcoin Forum

Initially there was a chicken and egg thing. People were not spending bitcoins because there were no merchants to spend their bitcoins at. Merchants were not accepting bitcoins because people were not spending bitcoins.

Now BitSpend comes out and allows you to spend bitcoins on anything on the Internet. For me, I used to go search for Bitcoin merchants before I purchased something online. Now I just go search for the best deal online and buy it through BitSpend.

In theory, as long as MtGox will exchange my government currency for bitcoins and BitSpend will convert my bitcoins for products, and miners mine to keep Bitcoin going, then Bitcoin can be used as a currency.

Sure, it would be nice for the Bitcoin economy if the consumer and merchant used bitcoins, but as a consumer, I get what I need out of the deal.

The fee to use BitSpend is certainly not ideal, but they will be coming out with a $5/month subscription service to use it which is quite fair.

So, can we stop worrying about "X company now accepts Bitcoin!", since pretty much every company on the Internet now accepts Bitcoin?

BitSpend it great idea (albeit a bit archaic) but still remains a single point of failure, the same reason I don't consider BitPay to have solved the merchant problem really either.

It currently is. Which is like MtGox being a single point of failure.

BitSpend seems like it requires such a small start up cost to get going that we will see more sites like that in the near future.

There is already bitsumo which does the same thing, though I have not tried them out yet.

BitSpend is really awesome, I used their service recently they are quick, let you know whats going on and even have a funny/joking touch, yet were professional.

ie their "meet the team" thing has their baby pictures and other stuff that's goofy!  :D

as a community if we truly value decentralization we need to make the choice personally to not use mtgox and other single points of failure.

I'll try out bitsumo if I need to do something similar again. Haven't heard of them till now.

Does anybody have information on how many orders they're taking in the previous weeks? I think it would be interesting to see..

I'm going to try them out with Amazon.

Bitspend are not a "single point of failure", when people see businesses like Bitspend take off, then there will be others than want to build a similar model. Some people are too concerned with supposed single points of failure when it is really their concern that they will lose $$$ on their BTC in a market-adjusting event. There is no single point of failure, not even MtGox. The price will stabilize over the medium to long term as companies grow and compete, the BTC economy is still very immature.

Im wondering...can I buy stuff on ebay using bitspend?

I looked at both websites, bitspend and bitsumo.  Great concept.  I plan on using one or both just to test it out.  This sort of thing builds confidence in BTC.

On the other hand, I wonder how long it will take for the US government to knock on the door of Bitspend.  Their servers are located outside of the US, but appears the company is based in the US.  They have an LLC registered. 

Has anyone used BitSpend yet? I would be curious to know if/how they work.

I think there are probably limits to it effectiveness however. Can I book a flight ticket through them for example?

I have used them. I bought some dog food for my dogs and a book for my nephew. It is actually quite convenient, I do not even need to register and setup my checkout at the online store I am buying from either. They are like my personal shoppers.

I am not sure about plane tickets, I was wondering about that myself. Maybe if you went through all of the steps then gave them the website and the exact choices necessary they may be able to do it. I was considering doing this for a cruise.

You can always try, all they will do is send an e-mail saying that they cannot purchase it for you.

We've been doing what Bitspend does a year or more before they opened ( biz in sig) !  The business models seems good so far as business has picked up for us fairly well. I don't believe they or us will ever take over Bitpay.

It's a shame that BitSpend has ceased trading which is why we have started our own alternative at - SpendWithBitcoin.com (http://SpendWithBitcoin.com)

lol

I just hope the buy anything with bitcoin services perform due dilligince in notifying the purchasee's that thier order was facilitated with Bitcoin as a promotional tool for Bitcoin!  A secondary market demographic these businesses could offer is to help merchants enable direct bitcoin spending which is probably more valuable in the long run for you all anyway.

Just a recommendation :-)

the bitspend system only truly works with websites that dont lock the delivery address to the bill payers details on the method of payment.

how they work is fundamentally you hand them bitcoin. they cash out they then use fiat on the website. they make it seemless by having a reserve in the institutional bank account which they use for purchases, which then gets refilled a few days later once the online exchange transfers arrive at the bank.

its the same as me buying stuff with FIAT debit card and the reimbursing my bank account by selling out my bitcoins.

the merchants never know it was a bitcoin purchase, so they never get any info about demands of their business from the bitcoin community, the merchants dont do anything special that is in anyway related to bitcoin. thus oppertunities to say

"hey amazon do you realise you process XX amount of bitcoin trade per day, it may be of benefit to adopt it internally as a payment method" become a missed opportunity.

anyone that does these services it might be worth keeping a tally of how much trade certain merchants receive, allowing PR guys within bitpay or bitcoin foundation, the community or yourselves to approach these merchants, showing them that there is a demand and customer base worthy of them offering bitcoin direct

Not all but many have comments box's or send out customer service feedback forms for comments, this is where I think a quick note that the order was facilitated by bitcoin or some such would be good.  If they see this note often enough they might consider things internally, but that is also good advice to keep track of these stats for other marketers to approach businesses with.

BitSpend is closed, Chase bank has seized their money and are not planning on returning it.

/thread.

That sucks, I used them whenever I could for my online purchases.

I wonder if there could be a good p2p way of doing this where you submit your product that you want to purchase and several people bid to fulfill the order for you using their own credit card.

And the banking industry's slowly-grind-bitcoin-out-of-existence policy marches on.  ::)

All in vain, but still damaging to those caught in the grinder.

I am offering the same services if you still want to buy things that way.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264775.0

Shameless plug  ::)

Did you actually do anything to mitigate the problems that Bitspend ran in to? It would be a shame to be shut down for the same reason they were (not that they did anything wrong, but unfortunately it's on you to account for bankers' ignorance regarding Bitcoin).