Underestimate blockchain at your peril [LWN.net]

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 18:51 UTC (Thu) by gracinet (guest, #89400)
In reply to: Underestimate blockchain at your peril by nix
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Well, real currency or not, SFC just got a donation in bitcoins and says it plans to accept bitcoins for the projects under its umbrella.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/jan/11/pineapple-fund...

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Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 20:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

But in order to *do* anything with that donation, they'll have to find some way to convert the damn thing back into dollars or some other mainstream currency. Good luck with that. (Will the time spent finding a way to do that, administering the payment method, etc be worth less than the donations that'll arrive via that route? Often the answer turns out to be "no".)

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 21:43 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

I would even estimate that the time I spent answering people who ask me "why doesn't krita accept bit/doge/whatever/coin" is worth more than the donations that would arrive!

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 22:38 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

For a small business owner's perspective on accepting Bitcoin, I enjoyed reading Colin Percival's blog post from a few years ago:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoi...

he claims that Stripe's service means that he doesn't actually have to deal with bitcoin, Stripe just sends him dollars. So bitcoin is being used to make a transaction anonymously, but not to store value long-term. This seems to be the best of both worlds...

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 13, 2018 10:25 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

What do you mean, "good luck"? Get an account at a reasonable broker, send coins there, sell them, transfer $$$ to own bank account. That's less work (and cheaper, even including transaction cost) than opening a non-$-based account at a bank and getting the money converted into dollars.

Yes, bitcoin transaction cost are insane at the moment, but that's only a problem if you want to get the transfer included in the next block or two. If you're willing to wait, reduce them.