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Comment by Astrohacker | Hacker News Reader

If you accept bitcoin, then there is no third party that can freeze your account.

That's also true if you accept payment in soiled panties or puka shells, but the trick is convincing everyone involved - the venue, the speakers, the staff, and the merchants you're relying on to print t-shirts and the like - to accept this as a form of payment.

Praytell, what venue accepts payment in bitcoin?

It is true that Bitcoin adoption levels don't make it feasible to rely on completely for conference registration, but it makes sense to start offering it as an option so we can gradually grow an alternative to Paypal, who has been pulling these shenanigans for years. It usually takes a day or two to convert Bitcoin to currency so there isn't a big reason not to offer it as a payment option.

By offering it as an option, you no longer have the option to not rely on it completely. What happens when everyone decides to pay in Bitcoins? I don't think the caterers will accept them as a form of payment - they'll echo Doug Shaftoe's sentiment:

" Doug’s regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. "What’ll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?" "

Ideally you automatically eliminate Bitcoin as a payment option in the online interface when a certain threshold is passed (or just do this manually if need be). The odds of this happening, however, are slim to none as adoption is not there yet.

Regarding caterers, as I said in the previous comment in this thread it usually takes 1-2 days to withdraw fiat currency from a Bitcoin exchange. Really not a problem.

It's a medium of exchange, they can exchange it for USD.

So are puka shells. And bitcoin's exchange rates are fluctuating pretty rapidly, especially since exchanges tend to randomly disappear. What happens when you have $5,000 in bitcoins, and the bithurf.com goes down and suddenly you only have $500 in bitcoins?

>And bitcoin's exchange rates are fluctuating pretty rapidly

Not that rapidly. When pricing in Bitcoin most buyers are okay with prices being based on recent pricing. Add a bit of padding to your Bitcoin price to allow for normal fluctuations and you're fine.

>What happens when you have $5,000 in bitcoins, and the bithurf.com goes down and suddenly you only have $500 in bitcoins?

You wait a couple of days for the value to go back up (at least that's how it played out when Mt. Gox crashed). Significant non-short-term pricing movements in Bitcoin land don't happen overnight.

What? Just sell the bitcoins and pay for things in dollars.

Hasn't the market fluctuated fairly rapidly in the past few months? I'd hate to accept $10,000 worth of conference fees in bitcoins, only to find out that I can only get $5,000 out of them. At a rate of $1,000 a day - or whatever the exchanges are limiting the daily trades to these days.

I'd hate to accept $10,000 via paypal and only get $5,000 out of it. At least with bitcoin there is a chance it will go up in value rather than down.

> I'd hate to accept $10,000 via paypal and only get $5,000 out of it

Me too. Which is why I wouldn't use paypal, either.

In the extremely unlikely case that Bitcoin becomes a generally accepted currency, I suspect the government will regulate it. Such regulations will most likely provide a monopoly such that only certain credit card gateways and Paypal can facilitate transactions in them. Which means you're back to square one.

That said, Bitcoin looks like a crowd sourced Ponzi Scheme to me, a buggy one at that.

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