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At Soylent, we have been accepting Bitcoin using coinbase. The decision to do so was based on marketing and the anticipation that not many people would actually
by caublestone 13y ago
At Soylent, we have been accepting Bitcoin using coinbase. The decision to do so was based on marketing and the anticipation that not many people would actually use Bitcoin and we wouldn't have a large risk exposure. To date only 130 people out of 12,000 have pre-ordered Spylent using Bitcoin. Our total risk exposure was less than 1% of total revenue. The recent rocket ship rise in a Bitcoin valuation has valued our Bitcoins at 10% of total cash from revenue. So far, the decision to accept Bitcoin has been a tremendous success.
The recent rise in Bitcoin valuation is speculation based on merchant trends. Well established merchants in Asia are starting to accept Bitcoin. The total valuation of Bitcoin is still around $15Bn. The total value of annual US domestic cash flow is somewhere around $15T. Think about the potential of Bitcoin. Highly unlikely? Absolutely! But think about if you woke up tomorrow and Amazon or Apple announced that they would start accepting Bitcoin? What do you think the valuation would be?
- mcintyre1994 13y agoOut of interest, do you know how standard it is for merchants to hold onto bitcoins after accepting them? I always figured they would be converted pretty much straight away, but with that risk/reward profile maybe others are doing something similar?
- caublestone 13y agoI wish I knew! From our perspective, because our total risk exposure is very minimal (again less than 1% of total revenue has come in from Bitcoin) we don't have a need to convert into cash immediately and can instead hold on to them for future use. I imagine every business does this risk assessment to determine their bitcoin conversion policy and all have different sensitivity to risk (i.e. silk road 100% bitcoin revenue > soylent 1% bitcoin revenue).
- psionski 13y agoDon't... don't do that. There are people insisting that you can't buy anything with Bitcoin, you're ruining it for them.