You don't seriously believe that? Tens of thousands of sites may 'accept' them, but the vast, overwhelming majority of them are sites that sell first-hand virtual goods, i.e. they have an infinite supply of a good for which they are not bound to submit fees to third parties per sale. There are certainly a few exceptions like Tiger Direct, yes, but those denominate sales in established currencies and convert them at the going exchange rate. And given that BitCoin is on a pretty much downward slope against all currencies, the likelihood is that the value of the BitCoins upon purchase is less than their value upon acquisition (however acquired).

Now why would a programmer in France getting work from the USA report his earnings in BYR unless there was something untoward going on? Sounds like money laundering.

And unless you actually use that money on the same day, chances are you'll be losing much of that paycheck in currency depreciation.

Throwing around accusations of racism is a dangerous thing. It has nothing to do with the fact that you may or may not be from Belarus and everything to do with the fact that you are encouraging use of a failing artificial currency.

There is a good, sound economic reason why Bitcoin is failing. Most currencies don't allow just anyone to "print money" as Bitcoin does, and with damn good reason - it devalues the currency and causes inflation. Bitcoin might have been a sound idea had it not been for the problem of publicly available mining software, but as it stands, it puts the power of devaluation and inflation in the hands of a collective that really shouldn't have it.

At the end of the day, I doubt that Bitcoin will really establish itself as a currency for physical goods, as its value is simply too volatile for it.

That being said, in the long term it may find a niche in the form of a virtual currency for virtual goods, because neither virtual goods (the economic problems with which I argued here) nor virtual currency are subject to the same scarcity issues that nationally-backed currencies or physical goods are. If you have a currency that is infinitely "reprintable", and a product that is infinitely "reproducable", those are a better match. I find the use of real currency for virtual goods a similarly problematic idea as the use of virtual currency for real goods. Virtual and real economies are fundamentally incompatible with one another.

(And before someone starts banging the "your bank credit is all virtual" drum, no, it's not - reserves of nationally-backed currency are limited, even if only artifically, which eliminates the problems of the virtual economy).

Issues to consider:

- Accepting Bitcoin would mean that GoG would have to charge different prices based on method of payment used - or absorb Bitcoin exchange fees and exchange rate fluctuations.

- Bitcoin has huge reputational issues in the Western world due to its association with silk road and criminal activities.

- Bitcoin is a completely unregulated currency, so there is no guarantee it will still be around in a couple of weeks, let alone years.

- GoG would have to sell all received bitcoins immediately to reduce currency risk, thereby increasing FX risk to the organisation

- If you only have bitcoins and only earn bitcoins (the first time I've heard of this for an adult working, but hey, perhaps it happens), you sell some and put them in a bank or building society account, and then get a card.

Now, I'm sure that this is going to be misread as a personal attack, because this is the internet; it's not - it's just advice as to why Bitcoin isn't going to happen at the majority of western businesses and what you can do to get around this.

Isn't that the point? As long as enough people have interest in a decentralized currency it should likely stay. Of course if too many businesses are reluctant it won't take off or too slowly (maybe that's good?).

What's FX risk?

What I explained in my post above (first paragraph mainly).

FX is banking shorthand for foreign exchange. Financial accounting treats transactions in foreign currencies as a risk because of the volatility of exchange rates.

That's not how Bitcoin mining works. Mining doesn't allow anyone to create Bitcoins. The purpose of mining is to verify the validity of transactions and add them to the public ledger. The Bitcoin protocol itself creates new coins at a predetermined rate that is completely independent of people's mining efforts. New Bitcoins are used a reward for miners to provide an incentive for them to lend their computing power to the network. The existence of mining software is not a problem, it is an integral part of the system. Also, the amount of Bitcoins in existence is completely fixed as a function of time, meaning that the volatility of Bitcoin prices is purely the result of fluctuations in demand, not supply.

The problem with bitcoin is not inflation, but rather that it's inherently deflationary. I did I longer writeup on this earlier in the thread.

There is zero currency exchange risk, as you can instantly convert received bitcoins into a fiat currency of your choice, and get the exact amount in USD.

For example - you set your price at 20 USD. Bitcoin price raises to 2000 USD for 1 BTC? Then customer pays 0.01BTC, and gog.com receives 20 USD. Bitcoin price drops to 2 USD for 1 BTC? Then customer pays 10 BTC, and gog.com receives 20 USD.

How else do you think wordpress (15% of all internet websites run on wordpress), zynga, overstock and other shops I mentioned accepts them?

Porn.com started accepting bitcoin about a month ago. Now 10% of their sales come from bitcoin. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-10-percent-porn-com-sales/

Why would gog.com not want to increase their sales by 10%? You can research feedback from wordpress, reddit and other known and respectable companies. Research feedback from overstock.com, tigerdirect.com, and Sacramento Kinds NBA team, who all started accepting bitcoin. Tiger received orders for 250000 USD in 17 hours only, after accepting bitcoin.
www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1w0wvq/tigerdirect_processes_250000_in_bitcoin_payments/

There is zero FX risk, zero chargeback risk, you can accept payments from anywhere is the world, and the taxes are less than 1% (if you want to use companies like Bitpay or Coinbase). Since you sell games to every country in the world, its only logical, that you should offer a payment method which would be available to every country in the world.

Forget about bitcoin price and it being a currency. It is not a currency, it is a transaction network, payment method, network protocol and a currency all in one. Looking at bitcoin for only its currency aspect, would be the same as to look at the internet as only an e-mail service.

Also, I would like to ask a rhetorical question - why would anyone be against gog.com implementing a new payment option? You don't have to use it if you don't want to, but this payment option would enable many people (who weren't able to do it before) around the world to shop at gog.com. Why would anyone be against that? I honestly don't understand where all this anger against bitcoin comes from...

Irrational fear towards new stuff. I also think due to societies regard to governmental centralization and relying on that most stuff is simply better if it has a central authority we tend to be cautious against things that have a chaotic nature. If something happens with a normal currency we can blame the government in a country and then vote in a new representative leadership. If something happens in bitcoin you can only blame yourself for not watching out (or diversified) and I don't think people in general like to blame themselves even if they are the cause.

Add in to the fact, like torrents, people don't want to be associated with something that screams criminal activities which are also irriational reasons.

Last but not least, it's also about trust and knowledge of the matter. I don't think GOG has the talents available to make the necessary step to add it as a payment. Maybe in time but not now. Only my guess of course.

Sorry, I don't believe GOG will accept Bitcoin right now as their current priorities are trying to accept real currencies.

Which is in a nutshell all the reasons that Bitcoin is a stupid idea that will never fulfill its stated purpose and collapse leaving the greatest fools holding the bag.

Scarcity is no foundation whatsoever for a currency; it is a recipe for hoarding, deflation, and collapse. In a well-ordered currency, the supply of money and the rate of its creation are regulated by the need for liquidity and stability, not by some predetermined formula that creates a certainty of illiquidity and instability.

The cooperative use of computers to "mine" is a pure waste of natural resources and a pure contributor to further climate changes. The profit to be made by it is an incentive to computer crime. The sooner this fad dies a horrible death, the better.

If you assume you can instantly convert bitcoins into USD, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and instantly receive the USD into your USD bank account (pretty unlikely due to banks not being 24/7 organisations) and if you could track in real time the value of a bitcoin against USD and create a website that updates bitcoin prices in real-time, and communicates these to the customer, again in real-time, without creating a monster of a website that takes ages to load, then, yes, this *might* work. This would be the only way to completely remove currency and foreign exchange risk.

The above ignores how incredibly difficult it would be to correctly account for the revenue on transactions and ensure that the correct taxation is paid to the correct local bodies. It would be bloody hard work and cost a fortune in accountancy fees. There's a reason why online retailers charge fixed prices in fixed currencies rather than letting you pay in whatever you want.

It also ignores the (largely unknown) legal loopholes that a company wanting to use bitcoins would need to jump through. e.g. a lot of US companies, particularly start-ups got shut down for violating money transfer rules when accepting and making payments in bitcoin.

As to why the GoG community is a lot more cynical that other holes on the internet, I think it's because a lot of us here are much older than the teenagers found on most video games websites (largely due to the games being ones that were around when we were teenagers in the 90s). We've been around long enough to see people get burnt. Like any currency, bitcoin will crash, and when it happens, people will lose money.

I'm not saying that I'm necessarily against GoG accepting Bitcoin if they want; but I personally believe that the costs of doing it outweigh the potential benefits and that the time, effort and money would be better spent bringing new games out.

Also, in the real world, using porn as an example to show how awesome something is doesn't normally go down too well!


EDIT - although it looks like in the light of their recent pricing announcement, GoG aren't too worried about accepting different amounts in different currencies - so that bit just got easier.

well, bitcoins are not really much more fraud than most economic items used today. Its all about "trust". As long as people believe in them, they work and maybe even rise their worth - but certainly it might go "Gox" as well..

Then again, its ultimately possible with any sort of money if think about it hard enough.

I wasn't aware of this, I believed that it was actually the identification of new coins. This has certainly been the spin that BitCoin people have put on it.

So are you saying that without the proof of work "mining", the transactions would lose validity? Surely this is a major risk as a currency is (as you said) of a limited quantity, and at some point there's no incentive to mine it.

However I've a feeling you're wrong. What you're suggesting means that someone can give out BitCoins, which suggests that they are centrally controlled. This suggests the entire currency is vulnerable to a compromise of that system.

The way Bitcoin works without a central authority is by keeping a public and permanent record of all transactions that have taken place since the beginning. To make sure that all transactions are valid (to prevent errors or fraudulent transactions) they need to be verified by the network as a whole. This is what mining is for.

Every time a transaction takes place it is broadcast to the entire network. Mining nodes collect these transactions into blocks and make them permanent by adding them to the end of the existing chain of blocks at fixed time intervals (on average every 10 minutes). In order to do this each node tries to find a proof of work. Whenever a node finds the proof of work it transmits the latest block to the network. If the block is accepted as valid by the other nodes, the miner is awarded a specific number of coins.

Every Bitcoin thus begins its life in the wallet of a miner. This may lead to the impression that it was the mining process that generated the coin. However, this is not the case - a specific number of coins is automatically created at fixed time intervals and awarded by the network to whoever happens to be the first to find the latest proof of work. There is no central authority giving them out.

I didn't understand your point about there being no incentive to mine at some point, could you elaborate?

Great, thanks for the explanation that makes it clearer to me, I think, let me repeat back my understanding if that's ok?

Mining "can" identify new bitcoins, but this is because they have been released at the time when the mining took place, and they happened to be mined. I'm a little confused about the "awarded" term, for a decentralised currency, surely such "award" cannot be anything discriminatory towards a miner and is just something that is weighted towards those mining.

So, assuming that's all fine, we have the miners, and they are mining bit coins which in turn prove the work of others. I suppose that until said mining is complete, those people that have traded a bit coin (and thus required proof of work) don't have a valid bitcoin? Is that how it works. My confusion lies with how the miners are contributing to the validity of the currency.

From this I could only partly answer your question, as it depends on your answer. If the miners make the currency valid, and BitCoin is finite, surely the currency's validity is finite?