Out of interest, do you know how standard it is for merchants to hold onto bitcoins after accepting them? I always figured they would be converted pretty much straight away, but with that risk/reward profile maybe others are doing something similar?
I wish I knew! From our perspective, because our total risk exposure is very minimal (again less than 1% of total revenue has come in from Bitcoin) we don't have a need to convert into cash immediately and can instead hold on to them for future use. I imagine every business does this risk assessment to determine their bitcoin conversion policy and all have different sensitivity to risk (i.e. silk road 100% bitcoin revenue > soylent 1% bitcoin revenue).