You Can Do a Lot With Bitcoin

I collaborated with my colleague Mike Casey on a post this week, listing some of the things you can buy with bitcoin: tickets to the Sacramento Kings, classes at the University of Nicosia, gold (yeah, really, no kidding), dates, dates with other bitcoiners, a house in Southampton, luxury autos...well, you get the picture.

Yeah, bitcoin's still a mystery to most people. For what it's worth, I can state this definitively about bitcoin, though: it works. At least on an individual basis. I can say this because I have physically seen purchases made with bitcoin. Whether the currency ever gains wide acceptance or not, whether it can support large numbers of people using it, there are a lot of questions surrounding it. But on a small-scale basis, a simple transaction between two people, it works. It facilitates commerce.

Here's a bit of the post. You can read the whole thing over at the MoneyBeat blog.

From Space Travel to Pizza, Your Bitcoin Goes Far These Days

You can’t get much more mainstream than professional American sports. In that sense, Thursday’s news that the Sacramento Kings basketball team will let its fans use bitcoin to purchase tickets, jerseys, hot dogs and anything else from its selection of products may go down as a key moment in the digital currency’s coming of age. 

But this is only the latest in a steady progression of vendors choosing to transact in bitcoin, a group that is at the vanguard of the digital currency’s bid for legitimacy.

There are now tens of thousands of merchants around the world accepting bitcoin. Merchant processor Bitpay now has more 20,000 separate clients and says that at its current rate of growth it will hit 100,000 by year end.

So, even though bitcoin might not yet have truly earned mainstream status, there’s already a lot you can do with it.