Vancouver, BC, Canda. (Newswire.net — August 4, 2014) Overstock.com was the biggest online retailer to accept Bitcoin in January 2014. The aftermath of the news became a firestorm of publicity for Overstock.com, and that publiity was an unexpected side-effect of a simple comment made by Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne. Mr. Byrne stated in passing, in 2013, that Overstock.com would “probably” begin accepting Bitcoin by the end of 2014.
The wave of media that followed that comment prompted Mr. Byrne to take serious steps to begin accepting Bitcoin on Overstock.com in early 2014. This decision turned out to be a very good one, for many reasons, according to Mr. Byrne.
In fact, Overstock.com reports some of the benefits of accepting Bitcoin to include: a 3% savings on merchant processing fees, no fraud, no chargebacks, and quadrupling is bottom line, for those transactions that take place in Bitcoin.
What was also unexpected was how easy it was to begin accepting Bitcoin. Mr. Byrne stated that there were “No problems. No hiccups. It just runs. Its another payment mechanism.”
So, the logistics behind this decision have been very positive for the company.
And he encouraged other companies to follow suit, “You want to get in on the ground floor, you want to support this, because clearly Bitcoin has a furvent following… [and] If your not doing it now, you’ll be doing it five years.” Says Byrne.
It is clear that Mr. Byrne has high hopes for the technology underlying the Bitcoin protocol.
In this invterview with Success Council’s Max Wright, Mr. Byrne and Max Wright discuss the expanding possiblities of the Blockchain technology, which underlies the Bitcoin protocol, to functions well beyond a transfer of value.
Overstock.com’s CEO hopes that the techonolgy will help solve some of the problems created by socialist solutions, which he categorizes as, “expensive, low in quality, and harming the poor.”
With Overstock.com’s positive experience, and Bitcoin gaining steam worldwide, many merchant processessing companies have been reporting sharp increases in sign ups.
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Success Council: a Company teaching people how to prepare and profit during times of global economic crisis. We accomplish our goals through advocating investments in physical gold and silver, Bitcoin, internationalization, preparedness, and above all, an ideology of freedom.