Since this is my first post on Bitcointalk, I'll make it a bit of a self-introduction as well. I am an American citizen living overseas in Beijing, China. As most of you probably know, the internet here is censored somewhat and most expats and tech-savvy Chinese people use VPN services to bypass "The Great Firewall of China."
I'm new to bitcoin, as well. I have been interested in it for several years, since I first heard about it, but only in the last couple weeks did I start really learning more about it and getting my hands on some BTC of my own.
I decided to contact my VPN provider, Astrill, asking them when it would be possible for me to pay using Bitcoin. They responded:
You can pay with Bitcoin right now. We can manually generate Bitcoin address for you. Please generate an invoice first, or tell us what you want to purchase and we will generate invoice for you.
Best regards,
Astrill Technical Support
I wrote back:
Thanks, I currently have several months left that I have pre-paid for, but when the time on that is up I will definitely be paying with Bitcoin! The Bitcoin community can bring a lot of extra business, it might not be a bad idea to make Bitcoin one of the standard payment methods when checking out.
There's a startup called BitPay which handles Bitcoin transactions for websites and businesses... users can pay with Bitcoin and your business receives the USD equivalent.
This morning I received another email from them:
Hello GGGGG,
We have successfully integrated BitCoin payment method via BitPay.com. It has been tested, and it's live now.
Best regards,
Astrill Technical Support
That went a lot better than I expected! Bitcoiners, seriously consider spending a couple minutes once in a while writing to businesses that you know and use, and let them know that there IS a market for BTC. Even if they don't integrate right away (like Astrill did), it will make merchants more aware of alternate payment systems and that there are people out there who would prefer to pay by bitcoin.
Thank you for reading.
