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Bitcoins can now be used to pay for Domino’s Pizza
- ravenp 14y agoDoesn't that defeat the purpose of anonymity? With coins being hard to get in the first place and a large fee, I can't see anyone using this.
- btilly 14y agoBitcoin is a currency. The point of it is to buy things. Because it is based on encryption, it can provide both hiding of who you are, and strong proof of who you are. But it is cool that it can also supply you with pizza.
- edanm 14y agoCompletely inappropriate comment for HN, but the sentence: "Because it is based on encryption, it can provide both hiding of who you are, and strong proof of who you are. But it is cool that it can also supply you with pizza." Seriously made me laugh out loud. You just made my day :)
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- lolcopters 14y agoThey dont think it be like it is but it do
- jerguismi 14y agoIt is useful if you happen to have some coins and want to spend them without converting them to USD. Useful to some. I don't see how it defeats the anonymity. If you fear that the pizza service is run by FBI, you can always use your coins through a mixer.
- throwaway125 14y agoWhile it may be easy to transfer bitcoins anonymously, spending them anonymously on tangibles is just as hard as spending any other kind of money anonymously. Tax evaders are often caught because their lifestyle and assets are inconsistent with their reported income, and not necessarily because government is able to follow their money. from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths
- Tichy 14y agoBitCoin itself is not anonymous, although you can attempt to make it so. But anonymity is not the main selling point of BTC.
- drchaos 14y ago> anonymity is not the main selling point of BTC To expand on that: the main selling points of BTC are that it's easy to transfer and that there is no central bank, which makes it impossible to tap into your funds by increasing the money supply. If your only concern is anonymity, cash is the much superior option (true anonymity vs. mixing).
- majmun 14y agothere will be order pizza API in future if( dateTime.Now == friday ) { orderPizza(pizzaType, pizzaSize); }
- benparsons 14y agoFor interest, this has already been around: http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/06/09/order-dominos-pizza-via-command-line/ http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/06/09/order-dominos-pizza-via-...
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- arethuza 14y agoSun NeWS had a pizza tool for ordering by fax in the early 90s: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/pizzatool.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/pizzatool.gif
- bfwi 14y agoThe exchange rate between USD and BTC is quite volatile. Either they have to constantly change the bitcoin price, or your pizzas will frequently get quite a bit cheaper or more expensive.
- nwh 14y agoI imagine stores counter that by setting the price in USD on the server side, and then using an API to convert it into bitcoin on each page view. Problem solved.
- bfwi 14y agoSo they constantly change the price then, albeit automatically.
- Drakim 14y agoWouldn't this be an issue any business that offers prices in more than one currency experience?
- bfwi 14y agoBitcoin is unusually volatile. The exchange rate of eg. USD to EUR is much more stable.
- MacsHeadroom 14y agoMuch more stable, yes. But it still fluctuates as much as 4% on a daily basis.
- lonnyk 14y agoWouldn't they just charge a flat price in BTC and then only sell it on the market for USD when the exchange is high?
- jerguismi 14y ago
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- camus 14y agoyou can now convert your drug money into pizzas , neat!
- crdoconnor 14y agoEven neater, the feds can now convert your transaction trail used to sell drugs into a physical address.
- jerguismi 14y agoDetails, please. How are they able to do that in practice? There seems to be a lot claims like these hanging around, and not many explaining the steps in practice.
- Androsynth 14y agoIm not an expert, but I will try (and if im wrong, let me know). When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef. When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.
- jerguismi 14y ago> When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef. Definitely not. Transactions are public, but definitely not the information that connects transactions to identities or merchants. > When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases. Also wrong. If you send the transaction from a web wallet, the merchant receiving the coins can hardly say anything about you. It seems that there are lots of trolls here shouting something about bitcoin which they don't really know much about.
- mercurialshark 14y agoBitcoin mining can pay for sustenance (in theory). The future is here and it is delicious!
- dan1234 14y agoCan it also cover the electricity used in mining?
- SlipperySlope 14y agoSure: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator The problem for miners is paying off their mining equipment from the daily profit before that equipment is obsolete and can no longer make a daily profit given the cost of electricity.
- GhotiFish 14y agoOne thing to note about those calculations is that, if you're using electric heating, the energy you used to mine would of being used to heat your home. So it's not so much of a cost.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoProduct idea: electric heater that generates heat by mining bitcoins.
- davidw 14y agoI don't have any recollection of Dominoes being delicious pizza:-)
- patio11 14y agoBitcoin: a currency for which capability to buy pizza is noteworthy, required custom programming, comes with a 10% novelty tax, and is incapable of maintaining a single price for 24 hours.
- fwr 14y agoIt's the future!
- viraptor 14y agoIs there any currency which maintains a single price for 24 hours? (apart from those artificially connected to value of other currency)
- patio11 14y agoThis means that if you call up Domino's and ask them "How much does a large pizza with extra cheese cost?", and they quote you a price in USD or JPY or not-a-toy, you can reliably expect that quote to last long enough to pay for the pizza. (There is a related concern, as a pizza providing entrepreneur, that your currency should be stable enough that sales of Monday's pizzas can reliably purchase Tuesday's tomatoes without losing half their value overnight, but it actually does Bitcoin way too much credit to say that that is the main reason you can't reliably make a bitcoin-accepting pizzeria.)
- drewblaisdell 14y agoI don't understand why you think this is a point to be made. Yes, the ingredients/labor cost of a pizza from Domino's is USD-relative and the value of this new currency is volatile.
- wsdom221 14y agoI think the point is that it's not really a currency if nobody can print a menu with it as the denomination that is valid for even a month. MSFT or AAPL isn't a currency either. Sure, you can use it to buy money, but there's a reason no one even tries to accept it for a pizza. To be a currency, I do believe you should be able to print it on price tags that change no more often than weekly!
- mseebach 14y agoThis is not in any meaningful sense "paying for pizza with bitcoins" anymore that hauling your TV to a pawnshop, they buying pizza with the proceed is "paying for pizza with TVs" - it seems to exchange bitcoins for USD, then it buys a pizza for you with the USD. From the narrow perspective of a BTC-miner, yes, it's relevant, but for subscribers to the lofty goals of a central-bank-independent/anonymous currency it's pointless.
- redthrowaway 14y agoIt works for the very small set of people who have bitcoins they haven't bought with a traditional currency. This is bigger than the set of miners, but not by much.
- jerguismi 14y ago> This is bigger than the set of miners, but not by much. From bitcoincharts.com quickly estimating that the volume in exchanges was 2 million BTC. Bitcoins produced by mining = 3600*30 = 108000 BTC. Unless the speculators are constantly buying from each other, I would say that there are people earning bitcoins in the bitcoin economy, and the amount of those people vastly outnumbers the miners. But I doubt that they care that much about the pizza service...
- Nursie 14y ago"Unless the speculators are constantly buying from each other," I would wager that yes, that does account for quite a large volume of the daily exchange volumes.
- MacsHeadroom 14y agoYou would wager wrong, depending on how you define "large." The total exchange volume of all exchanges is only about 93k BTC per day. http://bitcoinwatch.com/ http://bitcoinwatch.com/ The daily transaction volume, with change transactions removed, averages around 400k BTC per day. So speculator trade is less than 1/4 of all Bitcoin transactions. Fun fact: SilkRoad is less than 3% of daily Bitcoin transaction volume 75% of trades are commercial in nature. There are thousands of vendors dealing in BTC- hundreds of which deal in it exclusively. Some are even among the most popular web sites in the world.
- crdoconnor 14y agoFed #1: Look, we've got all of these transaction details for people who have bought and sold marijuana. How do we chase them down, though? Fed #2: Well, 1) we'd need to give the stoners something they love dearly. 2) that thing would need to come attached to their address.
- sams99 14y agoBitcoins can be used to purchase marijuana, Bitcoins can be used to buy Dominos Pizza ... coincidence ... I don't think so.
- TDL 14y agoUS dollars can be used to purchase marijuana, US dollars can be used to buy Dominos Pizza. Coincidence? Yes, BTC & USD are both mediums of exchange and mediums of exchange are used to buy goods & services with.
- redthrowaway 14y agoThis would be far more impressive if Domino's now accepted bitcoin. As it is, it's just a very expensive exchange service.
- RaphiePS 14y agoI wonder if there's a generalized solution to this issue; that is, the inability to pay for most things using Bitcoin. If I remember correctly, Visa will let you create a "virtual" credit card so you can shop online without giving out your actual information. I bet a "bridge" between the Bitcoin and credit card systems could make a lot of money. Does anyone know if this is feasible?
- wmf 14y agohttp://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3260584/bitinstant-bitcoin-debit-card-official http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3260584/bitinstant-bitcoin... I would bet that this either never comes to market or it ends up being just as inconvenient to use as the existing exchanges.
- SlipperySlope 14y agoHas any other bitcoin news media event happened in the last few hours? Not the pizza deal because that is somewhat old news - but this HN post? The price jumped up from 24.5 to 25.5 and I don't see any other trigger! Back in 2011, I learned about bitcoin mining from HN and solved two blocks myself with a CPU miner. Those coins are worth several thousands of USD today. Thank you HN ...
- SlipperySlope 14y agoAh, I see that the BBC reported this story in last few hours too.
- Giszmo 14y agoA shop charging 20% to shop for you is not the bitcoin break through that would change the rate within hours. Look at the trade volume in $$. It increased faster than the exchange rate, so my guess is that speculators parted from their coins too fast and the rally will continue for some time and has nothing to do with very recent events. I consider all this the aftermath of the reward split, wordpress.com and the slowly materializing ASICS.
- owendbybest 14y agoOne theory is the increase in online gambling sites who use bitcoin. Gamblers are buying it up.
- logn 14y agoI don't think there's any truth to this theory. As far as poker, they're mostly all poorly designed and have no traffic. Maybe a straight-up casino site would be better where you don't need people to play against and you don't care about user interface. But I think the whole "drugs, gambling, hookers" element of BTC is just FUD. However, I think a ton of people are gambling on bitcoin itself. I've read that many investors say they've tried their hand at bitcoin. It makes sense. The market dynamics can't be much different than forex and are probably a fun experiment. But for serious traders I doubt they could wage big enough bets on BTC without driving up or down prices on themselves.
- axusgrad 14y agoA few years ago, someone bought a pizza for 10000 Bitcoins. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0
- gst 14y agoFor that amount of Bitcoins you can buy a house nowadays.
- SlipperySlope 14y agoBitcoin has the potential to disrupt current payment processing. The main advantage to merchants is fraud reduction. Bitcoin transactions cannot subsequently be reversed by the customer once received by the merchant. Additionally, bitcoin transactions have lower transaction fees than credit cards, wire transfers, cash couriers, and so forth. No wonder that more startups are developing bitcoin applications.
- icebraining 14y agoOn the other hand, the main disadvantage for consumers is fraud increase, for the same reason.
- nanidin 14y agoThe Bitcoin protocol has features (contracts) to deal with that, but I don't think it's really implemented/used yet. And I'm not sure how it would work in the context of pizza or other physical goods delivery.
- SlipperySlope 14y agoAgreed, but this factor is reduced for in-person purchases from brick and mortar merchants. Additionally, many online web sites feature merchant reliability scores, e.g. Amazon. Recent US legislation will make credit card processing fees more visible to consumers, with the consequence that low cost payment processors such as bitcoin will be even more competitive.
- SilasX 14y agoI don't get why people keep promoting the "no chargeback" aspect of Bitcoins, since the potential for chargebacks is often a good thing, and essential for establishing trust. Furthermore, Bitcoin (like any reasonable currency system, including cash) allows you to layer a protocol on top of it to allow intermediaries that can do chargebacks in the case of bad behavior. "No chargebacks" = "hey, just like with physical cash, someone can just run off with it once you transfer the money". Sure, sometimes that's what you want, but it's not something you have to accept as a result of using that currency type or unit.
- mongol 14y agoHow is an income of Bitcoins taxed?
- hooo 14y agoWould you only be taxed when converting it back to $$?
- MacsHeadroom 14y agohttps://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance
- mahyarm 14y agoSame as the income of a cash only business.
- return0 14y agoI wonder how dominos lawyers will feel about their brand name being used in connection with bitcoins, which so far are useful mostly for illegal trades.
- jauer 14y ago"However, it’s unlikely that the customer would be able to actually track the order through Domino’s online order tool." Actually, so long as they have your phone number for delivery issues/to give the driver directions you can track any Domino's order by phone number on their web site (https://order.dominos.com/en/pages/tracker/#/track/order/ https://order.dominos.com/en/pages/tracker/#/track/order/). Last time I looked they were passing json around or something and it was easy to scrape.
- TBCM 14y agoGreat, pizza! The more things we can buy with this virtual currency, the better! If you'd like to start using Bitcoins check out http://thebitcoinmaster.blogspot.com http://thebitcoinmaster.blogspot.com