Bitcoin Forum

As the title says, seems like people were expecting some lunar performance, but got some down-to-earth performance.

Do you think that Overstock.com's acceptance was a significant thing for the price of bitcoin? If yes, let us know.

I think any price boost was tempered big time by the Ghash.io story

Price dropping at coinbase should be expected if Overstock is converting to dollars immediately. it's effectively a big dump of coin. could be a good buying opportunity.

Pretty much this.
Because OS doesn't hold the Bitcoin, it's flipped immediately for $ (we must assume) and this causes a drop, not a climb!

It's a tiny amount of Bitcoin right now. It's possible the coins will be sold directly to Coinbase customers without hitting a market. It's a useful channel for them.

Overall it's massive news and a great prospect for the long term viability. Short term it might spook some day trading types for no particularly convincing reason.

obviously you don't understand how coinbase works. they are a exchange but also the counterparty to every trade. so coinbase buys the BTC and then sells it to it's customers for a markup. they don't buy unless they already have a seller lined up. it's almost risk free for them and sucks if you are selling BTC, but hell, at least they send you your USD in a week. still waiting on a wire xfer from gox I initiated November 11.

i agree with this. If the ghash.io-thing would not have been going on at the same time we would be in the 1200$-range by now. The two stories equaled each other out. Overstocks just saved us from an epic crash is my opinion.

I think it's because this wasn't "news".  Overstock announced it would be accepting bitcoin payments weeks ago, and at that point it DID boost the price.

The thing to look for is whether this is successful or not.  If the merchants that agree to accept bitcoin end up seeing very little reward and give up, it will ultimately cause major trouble to bitcoin.  If the exact opposite happens, we'll see even bigger merchants hop onto the bandwagon. 

At this point the success of bitcoin entirely depends on people using it.  Even if it's just a small percentage of your bitcoin, buy stuff with it.  Or, if you don't want to lower your bitcoin balance, like me, buy stuff with it then immediately replace what you spent. 

If you have bitcoin and you aren't spending any of it, you are not helping the cause whatsoever, and ultimately just hurting yourself. 

I had been wondering how Overstock intended to handle the transactions. Made my first Overstock and Gyft purchases today, mainly just to see (newbie). I'm interested to see what happens at every turn for bitcoin. No matter how things turn out, this is history happening right now. I may have to "suck it up" a 'little' if my $50. Target gyft card purchase now, turns into a $500. loss next year.

 [insert image of toilet paper roll made of $100. bills.jpeg]

One of the advantages of Overstock, and other merchants immediately converting to US dollars, is it prevents bitcoin prices from getting too bubbly, as it forces bitcoins onto the market to be sold. It also throws out the hoarding argument a little bit.

It's good that BTC is becoming more widely used however the price may suffer in the immediate future due to the dumping of BTC back on to the market.

Never hear of overstock.com.
Maybe a typical american-only store?

They do ship outside of USA, but yes, predominantly it's american. Only US-based customers may spend with bitcoin on that site.

The tiny amount of btc that overstock would be moving in the first day is hardly going to damage the market price. I'd bet that the news just hasn't really spread yet, tech people are busy, swamped with CES, etc. It doesn't have to cause an immediate 20% spike in the value of BTC for it to be a huge positive movement for the market.

They didn't announce that they would be accepting bitcoin payments, they announced that they PLANNED to accept bitcoin payments in about five months.   That was far from a sure thing and a lot could have gone wrong before then (including changing their mind).   

So it is significant "news" that a major retailer is actually taking bitcoin.  However the chart was already screwed up plus the recent bad news out of China and the mining bad news, so was too much to overcome.

http://www.overstock.com/bitcoin?TID=PRODPG:Bitcoin

They are accepting BTC NOW.

Yes that was my point.

Why is everyone suddenly ranting about Overstock again? Did nobody check the date on the news articles? I checked the site and don't see anything in their checkout yet, nice to see the actual CEO talking about it though.

Y'all didn't look too close at the checkout page on overstock did ya?  ;D

Set the country to USA, put something in the basket, go to checkout, checkout as a guest if you aren't registered and then look at the payment options...

this is another place to use bitcoin as a currency instead of as an investment which is great. Things will start to get really interesting when stores like this can actually use the btc rather than convert to $ immediately. Once they can use BTC to pay their suppliers, or their employees, then BTC will truly be a real currency and the overall value will rise.

crap selection of gpu's...cough cough

Haha, it is overstock after all. There is a couch I am eyeing however..

Not quite. Individual self-interest conflicts with group self-interest. As long as people expect the price to dramatically increase, they won't spend. Virtually no one will spend coins out of altruism to the group of all bitcoin holders.

Look again. I saw bitcoin as a payment option in the checkout cart a couple of hours ago.

Yeah lol, when they first announced they were going to be accepting bitcoin I was all like "I could have that little table, that nice comfy bed, that armchair, big TV blah and blah...". They are really expensive though! and I am in ye ol'england!

But I am all for the hodling and tbh, buying stuff I actually really need!

Like an Island, or a planet

...or a galaxy..



mwahahaha

Well overstock should be happy, Just spent $6,800 dollars with them in bitcoin that i would not have spent if they didnt accept bitcoin. Got a new camera, laptop, a new coffee table, 24 inch computer monitor and a ton of other stuff. It was a smart decision on their part no matter how it affects the community. I would have never bought from them if they didnt take bitcoin.

Thats because miners are making free money, so its like free goods to them

@OverstockCEO just tweeted that in the first 21hrs of bitcoin acceptance, they did the equivalent of $124,000 in sales across 780 orders. By my calcs, that's about 4% of their total daily business. And double the margin (their avg margin is 2%, and with bitcoin, they save 2% on the lack of credit card fees). Not bad at all.

It's crazy, back in April when I got into bitcoin I was thinking of all the things I could be buying with bitcoins if I actually had them due to the price spike. Now I have a handful which are like worth a fuck ton more than what they were back then, now, I'm like " hmm".

I guess I just got sucked into the community , that or I just got wiser? nah fuck that lol. I just want my planetary system!

Super brand new to the forum community, but not new to bitcoin. Too bad I didn't know about here until just recently. But along with Overstock taking bitcoin, up here in Denver(yes up, mile high city remember?) there are all kind of startups now taking bitcoin. Definitely a good thing in terms of long term investment in bitcoin.

Because it ISN'T slow.  Like many have said to people pumping alt-coins, "There are hardly any problems an alt-coin could solve that the bitcoin community can't solve as well."  It isn't about the base protocol, it is about the applications built on top of the protocol.  Overstock works through Coinbase.  The exact instant I initiated my bitcoin payment through Coinbase to Overstock, the payment was successful. 


My point was that this doesn't matter.  If Amazon announces they will be accepting bitcoin payments and the price goes up $1,000 overnight, but then only goes up $1 the day they actually start accepting payments, you can't turn around and say "Amazon's news on accepting bitcoins was underwhelming". 


I disagree.  Individual self-interest is the same as group self-interest in this case.  If people don't spend their bitcoins, major retailers will announce they are no longer accepting them.  This would have a devastating effect on the value of bitcoin, period.  Therefore, bitcoins must be spent.  If everyone holds onto theirs expecting someone else to do the spending, it's over.  If you are worried about losing future value, simply immediately replace the bitcoins you spend, problem solved.  In the meantime, for your self interest AND the group's self interest, spend bitcoin.

Instead of buying stuff with cash, buy Bitcoins and use them straight away. You can still hoard whilst promoting BTC.


I agree. I hope this will happen in the future.

Found it! That's some pretty poor web design though for such a big company.

No.  We have already confirmed via sources that bitcoin is pretty much done.  Not everyone knows this yet, but as more people become aware of the facts, the price will fall to $0.  Proof ------> 充分證實和真實

Well it ain't all that bad. For normal US customers it comes up automatically. The website design is a pretty clean and simple visual marketplace that lets people browse through their endless products.

For people outside the US it is hard to find though, and the checkout is a bit clunky.

Cheeky bastard, I thought you were serious for a sec there until I looked at your other posts hahahaa. Guess it is all confirmed bad news via sources and all though so... ;D

Only US shipping address for BTC payment ATM. Overstock has said intl. orders are coming soon.

Plenty of junk websites and businesses are using bitcoin as a marketing gimmick, overstock is so far the largest online.
 
If you wouldnt buy it with fiat, don't be duped into buying it with bitcoin, just because you can.
 
I don't think I've ever seen an established business offer competitive prices for their wares in bitcoin, there always seem to be a few % premium tagged on top to tale advantage of those being caught up in the hype.
 
Yesterday was the first time I've been on overstock in months and nothings changed, everything is cheaper elsewhere.

yeah, I was not impressed with what I saw their. It was also my first time there in a very long time...and I still didn't buy anything.

the fear of prices going down because someone like overstock ends up having bitcoins dumped doesn't seem all that problematic. based on the sales overstock did int he first day, if all coins were dumped at once it would only have changed the price of btc by about $10.  I also agree with others that more adoption and transactions going on should help decrease volatailty hopefully.

1) Velocity of money will naturally increase the price of Bitcoin.  As long as the retailer coin liquidation isn't synchronized for some weird reason, it will get lost in the noise of the market.  The more people use a currency, the higher its value due to nothing more than the delay between inflow and outflow.

2) Overstock saved the market from a more serious correction yesterday.  Ghash cancelled Overstock, regardless of whether you think it was all FUD or not.

This. As long as they're steadily liquidating the BTC, there isn't much in the ways of needing to worry about the dip in price. It's only at times where if they decide to dump all their BTC at the same time (which would be stupid on their part.. they'd be losing money) that BTC would be affected in a not-so-good way.

Overstock accepting Bitcoin is huge.

I think the number of large retailers accepting Bitcoin will grow exponentially in 2014 and beyond!

Didnt found a way to pay with Bitcoin at the checkout.. was'nt anywhere in the billing option ??
Is this already effective or what ?

EDIT : The option do not appears in the mobile version of the web site.. switching to classic site I can see the Bitcoin paiement option

Yes, quite some $ have been processed in bitcoins already.

Is your account address based in continental USA? Must be in order to pay with BTC from what's been reported.

Just placed my order. I love overstock!

Im in Canada, and I just been told Bitcoin paiement are just availlable for US customer..
Quite ironic for a currency without borders ;)

Told support that I wont order then.

Yeah, I mean, they're a pretty big business in USA, so they're probably going to need to be super careful about accepting currency from customers outside of USA (tax reporting purposes). I'm also from Canada too. It's natural to expect that eventually Canadians will be able to order from there with bitcoin.

This is a great thing for Bitcoin. I wonder how many people that don't use Bitcoin will notice that it's accepted at Overstock?

They aren't the same at all.

Suppose all but one person agreed with you, and spent their bitcoins. This would cause the price to skyrocket as merchants adopted it, and the one hold-out would make a killing by hoarding. On the other hand, suppose that 99.99% of bitcoin holders disagreed with you, and hoarded. The other 0.01% spend their bitcoins. This would cause a bubble that would quickly burst, causing the price to plummet. The 0.01% who already spent their coins would make out well, while the other 99.99% would be stuck with coins worth nothing.

Neither scenario is realistic, and reality falls somewhere between two extremes. As long as people expect the price to rise, they will be more likely to hoard. When the price stabilizes, people will spend more. This is inevitable in the early days of cryptocurrency.

In an open market people act in their own self-interest, not in the best interests of the group of competing players.

Buy the rumor, sell the news.

You are looking for a price rise too soon, probably will not be for another 2 weeks once new money is finally in, from the people buying this news alone that is.

Please support overstock and gyft and all the bitcoin merchants you can.

Don't fear, you can still HODL.   The key is to always exchange dollars for BTC, then buy with BTC.

For you it doesn't change your BTC hodlings and is equivalent to buying with fiat.   But for the merchants it is a big vote in favor of bitcoin, and it also increases the velocity of money in the bitcoin economy.

hodl and spend people.  hodl and spend.

the problem with this currently is that due to various fee's you'd actually be spending more money than if you just paid outright with fiat.  the more expensive the item the more you end up paying.

this is something that needs to be, and I think will be improved upon in coming years. Currently it's still 1) a bit of a hassle  2) actually more expensive in many cases   to use fiat to buy btc and then use the btc to buy an item.   The only time it works out in your favor is if the value of bitcoin has rose during that time period.

Not (necessarily) for the price of Bitcoin, but certainly for the consumer acceptance and utility of Bitcoin. I am persuaded that as long as Bitcoin is only used for speculation it will never amount to much. But if a real Bitcoin economy takes off, with consumers everywhere buying and selling things, and if more and more people become able to "live in Bitcoin" (that is, earning BTC and spending BTC for all basic needs including food, clothes, housing, education, entertainment...), then Bitcoin will start really changing the world and making it a better place.

WTG overstock, we all should support retailers who accept bitcon and rid of the corrupt Paypal.  

When I heard that overstock.com begins accepting bitcoin I could not help myself giving it a try. Unfortunately the famous online store only accepts bitcoin for items delivered to United States addresses. Being a Turkish resident I don't have a US address, yet I don't have any friends in the US that I can send gifts. So I decided to buy a gift using my bitcoins for the president Barack Obama.

Read the story: Nasreddin Hodja to meet President Obama
http://bitcoin-turkiye.blogspot.com/2014/01/bitcoin-tale-nasreddin-hodja-to-meet.html
https://twitter.com/bitcoin_turkiye/status/421981135761985536

That is exactly what I am thinking. A major company accepting Bitcoin will be the first domino stone to drop, forcing other big companys to follow. This could be the beginning of something very huge...

old miner. hmmm. Old Miner. someone who can no longer mine BTC profitably and now is pushing altcoins. GTFO, buddy.

update: OS refunded my order in BTC! I made a repurchace at the $900/BTC price. lol. bought cowboy boots for 0.1 Bitcoin. life is good.

Realistically the only other alt currency I can see being adopted by major retailers other than BTC would be LTC (Naturally, due to market cap, right?)

Sucks they only accept it for US orders...
Also, the shop seems really overpriced.
900€ for a Samsung Galaxy S4?! It is 440€ on Amazon.  Wtf?

Yeah, somehow euro prices are higher than dollar prices, which is absurd.

Cliff notes, overstock is truly awesome but not for everything. Buying a new bedroom set at clearance prices, shipped for free in the USA and paying no state tax? Awesome.

Buying a new phone from Europe? Apparently not so much.

The Worldstock section of overstock is an amazing project which brings unique handmade items from around the world to your door - and now for bitcoins!

But anyway, great news for Bitcoin, Coinbase, and Overstock.

Buying things with BTC is so much better for taking profits than converting to fiat, which is just...ewwww. Gross!

Now, time to do some shopping!  ;D

www.overstock.com

So about the "houseware" stuff, the prices aren't as overpriced as for the electronic stuff?

I agree it would probably be litecoin, but disagree on the reason. Market cap is a meaningless concept when applied to cryptocurrencies. It's calculated by multiplying the number of coins in existence by the price per coin at the time of the last sale. A little more meaningul would be trade volume in a fixed time peried, measured in common units, e.g. BTC or USD. However even that isn't very meaningful because some trade volume involves mixing or moving coins already held.

Litecoin seems to me to have the most established market among the altcoins at this time, but its standing might change in the future.

Marketcap isn't meaningless. If there's billions or trillions of coins in existence then there always going to be worth very little.

Couldn't agree more.

... well unless everybody on the planet starts dealing with these crapcoins then they might be worth something if you hodl them long enough, but that's not gonna happen, so no, you're not gonna become a millionaire of those millions of DOGEs youre holding lol.

You can make a bit doing this, but I doubt you're going to strike it rich, but they're certainly not going to be useful or worth anything in the longrun.

They aren't holding their coins, so all sales immediately create a supply in bitcoin. This could cause a temporary price drop if sales are high enough. I doubt this is much cause for concern although.

Market cap is meaningless because prices are determined on the margin. Say you premine a billion coins, and sell one for a dollar. That doesn't make you an instant billionaire because you can't sell the rest of them for a billion, or even anything close to that. Developers make prices artificially high by making coins artificailly scarce, and selling a few of them to suckers. Their coins look like they are doing well, based upon market cap rankings, but as I said, it's really meaningless. The market is being manipulated through artificial scarcity.

Did they refund the exact same amount of bitcoin or did they adjust for price fluctuation?

I don't think that people buying things on overstock rather than holding their coins could explain a temporary price drop because the number of coins spent in one day on overstock (if I recall correctly, about 135,000 USD) is tiny compared to the daily bitcoin trade volume (about 40,000,000 USD). A lot of the bitcoin volume is caused by people just mixing and moving their coins around, but even then, overstock accounts for about 0.33 percent of the total trade volume. I'll agree that even such a small change could have a noticable effect on price, but there exist so many other possible explanations, and no way of knowing for certain the real cause.

It's human nature to over-analyze, and determine a cause for everything, even when It can't be known for certain. If I showed a random signal, people would claim that it follows a deterministic pattern.

The US Government is going to sell the FBI's stash of Silk Road's bitcoins this week so expect the price of bitcoin to drop to $5.00 per BTC

Is this true? Link?

I'm interested in reading more about that.  Source please!

I think it was huge.  The price of 1 btc has still gone up recently despite a slight downtrend over the past few days.   I think the bigger factor is that other major companies will follow suit based on the success of bitcoin rollout to overstock customers

There are still fees for using Bitcoin. Coinbase has about an 0.5% spread, and a 1% fee.  So it costs Overstock about 1.5% to accept Bitcoin.

Of course it's not true. The guy was obviously joking. Even if the feds were dumb enough to do this, they couldn't legally, because the legal process hasn't completed.

They had said as much earlier. Then again, I was amazed to learn that in my own country, the Netherlands, the government does regularly sell seized goods before the legal process has completed. If the defendants are acquitted, they get back the amount the government got when it sold their possessions. The government tends to do that for bulky goods, good with highly variable prices, or if the costs of safe storage make it worthwhile to sell. In the case I enquired about it was a bunch of BTC seized from FBTC Exchange, which they sold because it was so volatile. I called the public prosecutor's office, and they explained the policy to me.

Refer to the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture . Sale of forfeited assets is handled by the U.S. Marshals Service: http://www.justice.gov/marshals/assets/assets.html . It takes a while for due process to run its course, and it's too soon for this to happen.

Wow, that's bullshit. how do they get away with this? That's essentially theft, not to mention handling stolen goods lol.

It's not theft if the law says you can do it!  :D Defendants do get compensation of course, if they are acquitted.

So, basically the legal system is a facade of fairness, but in practice is not. sounds like Uhmerica

Finally some bigger fishes is in the game :D
Just wish some of the bigger nordic companies would add bitcoin as payment :o