codelitt

No don't worry. It doesn't come off as critical at all. I would say its about split. Several of them buy a lot online which helps. They use it in real life occasionally, but often just change it into dollars when they need cash/local currency in their account. Some of them hold a bit of it.

A few real world examples:

Employee 1 takes a 50/50. He payed for his holiday with it because his travel agent accepts it. He splits about half of his paycheck and uses the BTC whenever possible.

Employee 2 takes 100% BTC, keeps everything in BTC and exchanges when he needs local currency, but manages to do almost everything in BTC.

Employee 3 takes a tiny percentage in BTC and just holds it as an investment.

From what our lawyers are telling us, that's right on the money. It's treated as a barter so you pay taxes on the USD equivalent if I remember correctly.

Ya! We've seen them, but we haven't been able to use their site yet.

100%. We're definitely aware of the legal side, and we're working with a team of lawyers and accountants on this particular issue.

Great! That's the goal.

That's an awesome idea. Maybe even some partnerships. We talked about doing an extended warranty/insurance program of our own where you can get insurance on the devices you register. Dunno yet though.

You're right. Right now we use ProtectYourBubble and it allows us to cover devices, electronics, and appliances. It's a decent start.

Noooooo. Just pushed an update. Nice catch.

Didn't even catch that. Thanks a lot.

Thanks. We appreciate the feedback. The hardest part right now is supporting all of the products out there. If it's not already supported (which means we have warranty info collected, a photo, msrp, and a bit of other info) then we go through and try to do it within 12 hrs. But this isn't immediate feedback for the user. Also we need to find a repair partner to help people get their stuff repaired.

I think most interesting will be in countries like Argentina (where I live). The government here has put obscene tariffs on imports, especially in technology. The government does this in an attempt to promote growth in local manufacturing and technology companies (albeit an attempt which only hinders the purchasing power of their people and growth of their economy in the long run.)

For example, iPhone's are not available here through the normal market. If you want an iPhone you would have to purchase one through MercadoLibre (Latin America's Ebay). An iPhone which costs you $600 in the states or Canada would cost you nearly double here. Even Android devices are generally extremely overpriced.

This combined with BBM and terrible messaging packages are the reasons why BlackBerry does so well here. Nearly everyone owns a BB here.

If Firefox can offer a reasonably priced phone which can offer an app ecosystem and (data driven) messaging service, I think they stand to win significantly - at least in Argentina.

I agree. Google Drive supports an entire world of Chromebooks, startups, small businesses, and quite a few large businesses. I can't imagine the traffic from a Reddit thread would bring the service down. Even if the doc had something malicious in it (which I doubt is possible because Drive doesn't allow for executable code), they surely have failsafes to wall off any bad files from the rest of the service.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Hipstomatic launched before Instagram? This whole article is very condescending and the epitome of the death of TechCrunch.