Diablo III replace Real-money ah with BTC

[Maged]

3.5 million sales on the first day alone.

I believe that 500 trades/day that use bitcoin might be enough to bring this forward to them.

[norulezapply]

@norulezapply Your naysaying is really very productive. I don't just mean here, I'm sure it's working wonders in all fields of your life.

It's not naysaying, it's called being realistic, which is working wonderfully in all fields of my life so far, thank you.

If you guys write the proposal and it gets accepted by Blizzard then that's great and I take back my thoughts and previous opinions. I'd love for something like that to happen. But, just being realistic, it probably won't, yet.

[MPOE-PR]

Maged: so let's try drafting a proposal here, at the very least it'd be useful as an exercise I think.

<salutation>
I'd like to recommend adding Bitcoin to the Auction House.

Bitcoin is without a doubt in my mind the future of all currency. The unit of account is not issued by any central authority, but moreover exists as the solution to a complicated hashing problem, which makes it immune to any outside intervention of any kind. Because of its unique cryptographic properties, Bitcoin is the hardest currency there is, being of absolute hardness: all transactions are final and irreversible. That's right, Bitcoin has a 0% chargeback rate, and always has, for all merchants.

There exists a significant and active market; daily exchange volume is in the 1 to 10 million range on USD alone, and there's probably about 100,000 people owning at least some coins. More importantly, these owners are typically better educated and more affluent than average IT techs and finance people, and they love it with a passion. There's no doubt in my mind that some people will buy a subscription simply to support Blizzard for dealing in BTC. In any event the likely goodwill benefits from this measure probably surpass any advertising or PR campaign available.
</salutation>

[rjk]

At this point I think they are looking for a large market, as well as implementation details. For instance, how are things currently handled on the auction house, is it by email or account number? Or by player name? I doubt they will want to switch over to a bunch of unintelligible addresses, because that would confuse the users. Come up with a detailed plan on how to properly implement it, and try sticking as close as possible to what they have created so they don't have to change much. Player experience is going to be of prime importance to them, regardless of how cool this bitcoin thing is.

[Bitcoin Oz]

At this point I think they are looking for a large market, as well as implementation details. For instance, how are things currently handled on the auction house, is it by email or account number? Or by player name? I doubt they will want to switch over to a bunch of unintelligible addresses, because that would confuse the users. Come up with a detailed plan on how to properly implement it, and try sticking as close as possible to what they have created so they don't have to change much. Player experience is going to be of prime importance to them, regardless of how cool this bitcoin thing is.

Bitpay or one of the other merchant sites is no different than paypal imo

[TraderTimm]

I can send a proposal regarding Bitcoin directly to the upper-management at Blizzard, without going through the low-level employees. The proposal would have to be pretty convincing, though, because I'd have to put my reputation with them on the line by sending it.

Easy. Cost benefit analysis, how much is saved over using bitcoin versus the percentages paid to Paypal and credit processors. Even better, tell them they can KEEP THE PERCENTAGE themselves since users are already used to their tier structure.

Have to wonder how much profit is eaten up by 'transaction' costs. It adds up, I'm sure.

[Herodes]

hm. the best way would probably be to get in touch with someone at Blizzard that actually has a say when taking decisions.