Friday Funding Roundup
Nick Clayton
2013-01-11
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/01/11/friday-funding-roundup-7/...
More intriguing is the angel investment in the Bitcoin virtual currency exchange BitPay.
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BitPay represents a potentially far more intriguing and innovative payment platform than the likes of Paymill. It has announced an investment of $510,000 led by Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver to help it try to become the PayPal of the virtual currency Bitcoin, as TechCrunch expains.
"What makes Bitcoin so interesting is that it flies in the face of payment models that we’re used to today; it’s a push model rather than a pull one. When you give a website your credit card and billing information to buy something, the company is pulling money out of your account. Giving up that personal information isn’t the safest thing, and Bitcoin allows you to “push” the money to a company to buy something. This means that no personally identifiable information goes with it, making eventual identity theft and fraud nearly impossible during the transaction."
Of course, that lack of personally identifiable information is attractive to people operating on the darker side of the Internet. But the same could be said of cash in the physical world. What BitPay does is similar to Stripe, Paymill or Paypal in offering back-end processing of payments.
"BitPay accepts Bitcoin and then puts “real” money into the bank accounts of businesses. Basically, there’s no worry on the end of merchants, because they end up getting paid the way that they’re used to. The difference is that a small business in Kansas City can now accept a payment from Indonesia for goods and services, which was nearly impossible before."
