Dutch energy company BAS accepts Bitcoin

[Paashaas]

As the first energy company in the world 


A (translated) TL;DR summary of the article:
BAS Nederland is the very first energy firm in the world to accept Bitcoin for payments.
Founder Arash Aazami states that Bitcoin adheres to their philosophy of reducing our dependency on old, restricting systems.
They expect their ideas to resonate with a lot of people who want to break free from 'old world systems' and notice that a lot of people are looking for new solutions that are beneficial to both themselves as well as their surroundings.
BAS is a company that focuses on durable energy and helps people who want to reduce the amount of (fossil) energy they use without requiring them to invest a great amount of money.

Official source
http://basnederland.nl/2014/03/bas-nederland-accepteert-bitcoin-als-betaalmiddel/

[Philj]

Hopefully something like this will help some other businesses accept bitcoin directly. One of the problems now is that if a business accepts bitcoins, it pretty much has to convert them to fiat to pay their employees and bills. If utilities start accepting bitcoins, then businesses that use those utilities have more incentive to start accepting bitcoins. The best part is this is one step further that the bitcoin economy can go without having to be converted to fiat.

[erono]

I think this is the 1st energy company that take Bitcoin

[Bonam]

Cool, that sounds like a great step forward for bitcoins. Hopefully this energy company is followed by many others.

[Abdussamad]

What is an energy company? I thought it was a utility company or an oil company but it's neither.

[knightcoin]

Miners now can pay their electricity bill with bitcoins

[thaaanos]

I would consider this event a milestone

[SlipperySlope]

This is indeed important.

I worked for a very large regional Electric utility in Florida, USA, programming and managing a portion of the customer billing function. Customers wanted to pay by a variety of convenient methods, yet because the utility operated as a regulated monopoly, it could not pass on to ratepayers as a whole, the merchant fees charged by credit card companies - thus credit card payments were not an option unless the ratepayer paid all the fees, which were percentage-wise onerous.

With a simple Bitcoin address, there is no fee to the receiver of the payment transaction - as the sender pays the fee, which is tiny percentage-wise. Integration with a Bitcoin payment service such as BitPay or CoinBase would cost more. But I suppose that if the utility kept the coin, it could be easily handed out to deserving and willing employees as bonus without exchanging for fiat.

Moreover, public utilities accepting Bitcoin will encourage governments to accept Bitcoin for fees and taxes, for the same reasons regarding credit card merchant fees, and the absence of charge backs.

Once governments routinely accept Bitcoin, banking as we know it slips further down the slope to obsolescence.

[DPoS]

crypto will need its kilowatt-crypto moment as the dollar was buoyed by the petro-dollar

perhaps that will take a few decades or small communities that are mainly green energy driven and fully support a crypto economy

accepting crypto and just switching to local currency wont do squat as we've seen the more places that accept crypto drives down the price as more use and then merchants sell than line up to buy

[SlipperySlope]

accepting crypto and just switching to local currency wont do squat as we've seen the more places that accept crypto drives down the price as more use and then merchants sell than line up to buy

I have thought about that also. But as soon as discounts are provided to business-to-business purchases made via Bitcoin, then merchants will recycle coins they received from their own customers into purchases in order to obtain the discounts.

For example, I can buy Walmart gift cards from Gyft and receive a small discount using reward points. For a company that routinely buys gasoline or other supplies from Walmart, that discount is significant.

[coincoin3]

I believe there will be more and more companies to accept bitcoins.

[zolace]

 The Netherlands do not intend to put any restrictions on the use of Bitcoin. The events taking place right now are only going to make the coin become more widely accepted in the country. Other countries should take a close look at what’s happening here, so they can see Bitcoin poses no threat to everyday life.