Unfortunately, I can't find a link to an online version of this article. I found an article in last week's Business Week that is an issue that just seems like the natural market for bitcoins: pot stores. Marijuana is now legal in Washington and Colorado states, but still technically illegal on the federal level. The article was titled "Banks dread contact high from pot stores" and these stores were forced to deal in cash only and pay sales tax in cash. They were asking if they need to have an armored truck service just to pay their bills.
I was immediately thinking that these merchants using bitcoin would make their lives easier when I read this. Sure there's security issues involved with bitcoin too, but they've gotta be a lot easier to deal with than transporting cash around in armored trucks. They were having to pay their sales tax bills in cash because of this. Coinbase could be a solution to this problem if someone could convince the Colorado and Washington state tax boards to accept it because they convert it into cash immediately so they wouldn't have to deal with bitcoin price fluctuations.
Know a pot farmer in either of these states? Let them know about bitcoin, you may just make their lives a lot easier.
These guys are already getting lots of trouble from the Feds & Federal laws, which as you might know, still consider weed illegal. I would think it twice before I added a payment system that would potentially gather more legal attention towards my business.
True, you've got a good point. It just seems like it'd be a heck of a lot easier logistically. It'd be even nicer, of course, if the Feds would just say, okay, you legalized marijuana, we'll make it legal just for those states, but sadly, no such luck.
