Three Huge Breakthroughs for Bitcoin

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Washington’s Blog
May 10, 2013

There were three big stories regarding Bitcoin this week.

Business Insider notes:

Union Square Ventures [an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga and other huge Web successes] principal Fred Wilson just led his first startup deal in nearly two years.

Wilson led a $5 million round in Coinbase, a startup for buying, selling, and accepting Bitcoins.

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“We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power,” Wilsonwrote on the USV blog.

Tech Crunch reports:

Today, mobile gift card company Gyft has partnered with BitPay to start accepting bitcoins within its app.

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Gyft allows you to purchase gift cards at more than 50,000 retail locations in the U.S., including Brookstone, Lowe’s, GAP, Sephora, Gamestop, American Eagle, Nike, Marriott, Burger King and Fandango. So, technically, you’ll now be able to use bitcoin to pay for a Whopper.

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The new bitcoin payment option is only available on the Android version of Gyft, but is as easy as choosing your choice of payment once you’ve chosen the gift card that you want to buy. Simply pick bitcoin and then use your wallet to pay for it.

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TC: How long do you suspect it will take until the average consumer gets educated on bitcoin and uses it?

Gallippi: Bitcoin is hard to use today, and that’s a good thing. There are still bugs and it is too risky for the average consumer. The infrastructure of bitcoin cannot handle hundreds of millions of users at this time, so a gradual adoption is better.

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TC: Since this lets you convert into a gift card, how long do you think it will take to be able to make direct purchases using bitcoin?

Gallippi: E-commerce will adopt new direct bitcoin payments faster than retail, since e-commerce already has payment gateways in place for software-only payments.

TC: How do you feel about the recent stories of DDOS attacks that have affected bitcoin and how that’s perhaps scared some people away from the currency?

Gallippi: Bitcoin companies suffer from DDOS like all banks do. However consumers actually are inconvenienced less with a bitcoin wallet DDOS. With your online banking, if your bank is down, you cannot access your money. However with bitcoin, if you are in control of your

This article originally appeared on : Prison Planet