Author

Topic: Bitcoin in meatspace (Read 770 times)

legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1076
August 12, 2014, 04:18:17 PM
#3
I have heard that Rakuten, the world's sixth largest dot.com company by revenues, is now accepting Bitcoin!

This is excellent news, but to my dismay, Rakuten had but $5.56 billion dollars in yearly revenue, far below even the lowest companies on the list I linked in the OP. It goes to show how small Internet companies are when one considers the big picture.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1076
August 08, 2014, 04:26:46 PM
#2
As an aside (and hence in a separate post), I am interested in what is currently the longest Bitcoin flow "chain". I shall give context for what I mean by this:

To my knowledge, most stores that accept Bitcoin from an end customer convert to fiat immediately. This represents a 2-chain, as seem below:

Code:
Customer → Store

Some stores keep all or some of the Bitcoin and use it to pay employees, thus forming a 3-chain:

Code:
Customer → Store → Employees

I suppose there must be at least one store that buys at least some of its goods from another company that accepts Bitcoin, which is another 3-chain:

Code:
Customer → Store → Company

(If the aforementioned Company then paid employees in Bitcoin, then it would be a 4-chain!)

I am aware that most business relationships are far more complicated than this. Indeed, the Bitcoin ecosystem is better modelled as a web that a single chain. But I am still curious as to what the longest documented chain is. Does anyone know of any 4-chains, or even longer ones (not including, of course, infinite loops)?
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1076
August 08, 2014, 04:20:51 PM
#1
Given Bitcoin's acceptance by Internet and technology giants such as the Wikimedia Foundation, Reddit, Dell, and more, I thought it would be instructional to look at the largest corporations in the world and count how many accept Bitcoin. The best way to rank such companies would be by sales, but not having found such a list, ranking by revenue works as a fallback.

The Wikipedia list of companies ranked by revenue is here.

Unfortunately, not a single one of those $100B+/year companies accepts Bitcoin at the moment. This was disappointing. It was also instructional; for instance, I was shocked that neither Google nor Microsoft make the list. Tech giants are valued much higher than other companies because of their potential and profit margin, but they do not actually sell that much stuff.

For now I am back to monitoring CoinMap, but I hope I can look back at this Wikipedia page a year later and see the seeds of Bitcoin acceptance start spreading outside the high-tech bubble.
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