Topic: [Breaking news]Australian online electronics store DigiDeals will accept Bitcoin (Read 5493 times)

I eat gluten free 90% of the time.  There are pretty decent substitutes for wheat available for most things, although breads can be hard to get right.  However, when my gluten sensitive fiance isn't around, I bake a pizza.

I'll defer to old engineer's answer, and then I'll explain why this isn't quite off topic, but I'll also mention that people who abstain from gluten "just because" are in the vast minority. Most people have either celiac's disease, which means eating gluten means a trip to the emergency room, or they have either a wheat allergy or gluten sensitivity (which means gluten will cause them to break out with acne, have indigestion, fatigue, etc.) Very hard to realize this is the cause as it's such a ubiquitous item in the Western diet. However, the mainstream media tends to portray it as (1) a small minority of celiacs buying the products out of necessity, and (2) a large majority of fadster hipsters buying it for no reason.

This may seem off-topic, but we are outlining a case in which a perceived "niche" value of an item causes an excess margin which many people are willing to pay. And this is most likely what DigiDeals has done with their 5% bitcoin fee. They know a lot of bitcoiners are staunch ideologues who support the anti-fiat cause and will buy something with bitcoins over fiat, even if it means a 5% fee.

Someone asked if it's worth "5% of your money." It's not 5% of your money, it's 5% of the purchase price. Big difference. If I bought a physical good in a store in my area, I'd pay 6% sales tax. And that'd be fiat. Most of the gas stations around here charge 10c more/gallon when paying with credit card. So it's not like we're not used to paying ridiculous percents of our purchase price for stupid reasons. With Bitcoin, I'd already have made more than 5% in appreciation between my DCA "date" and the time of purchase. Now, the question is, do I want to pay a 5% "niche" margin because I'm using something that is "hip" but actually costs the company less to process than other methods? No, I don't. So chances are I would choose a competitor. Or, if the 5% would be more than $5, I might use Bitspend which would serve a similar purpose. It's not like DigiDeals isn't converting the BTC right back to USD as well.
The 5% fee is a non-issue. If people are paying the 5% fee, that's their choice. If people aren't paying the 5% fee, DigiDeals will either lower the fee or stop accepting bitcoins. They accepted bitcoins for a reason; they're done their homework, so chances are if their bitcoin sales increase doesn't mirror that of similar companies who have begun accepting bitcoins, they will blame the fee at one of their boring board meetings and decide to lower it.

I'd like to know how they're doing it given that all of the brokers that have tried to set up shop in australia have gone bust because their accounts keep getting shut down. Mtgox AFAIK isnt trading much AUD these days....

Ok, if that's worth 5% of your money, go ahead and pay them with bitcoins 

It also saves you the trouble having to deal with Mt Gox

Way OT, but the question was asked:
Eating gluten-free without having Celiac disease was considered a fad "hipster" diet by some, which is what OP was referring to, but the science seems to be catching up with the hipsters that tried it.  In addition to Celiac disease (immune cross-reaction to wheat proteins) and wheat allergy (direct reaction to wheat proteins), there's a new clinical diagnosis of "wheat sensitive", and it's a real thing.  "Non-celiac wheat sensitivity diagnosed by double-blind placebo-controlled challenge: exploring a new clinical entity."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22825366

Best thing I ever did, diet wise, was to try going a week without wheat, what's called a challenge diet.  I figured out that, rather to my dismay, my body doesn't like wheat too much. It wasn't subtle, but since I'd been having wheat with almost every meal, I'd never noticed.  Fuck it, beer is still yummy, so while I don't abstain completely, I only have a few meals with wheat every week, rather than every meal every day.

On topic:
I bought a HD projector the other day from Bitcoinstore, and ended up paying about 5% less than Amazon: bought my coins for $110, was credited for $113.7 on bitcoinstore.  Also, the list price was about 2% less than Amazon or Newegg.

Hopefully DigiDeals will lower that markup to 2-3% at some point - 5% seems quite high, and I would be unlikely to pay it unless I were ordering something <$50 USD.  Perhaps DigiDeals saw how much business that Bitcoinstore was doing, figured they wanted a slice of that action before someone else took it, and they might as well see what kind of markup the market will bear.

all you guys bitching about the 5% fee are missing the big picture.

the strategy is to store your money in an appreciating currency (Bitcoin), and then convert to the depreciating currency (fiat) just before you need to make a buy.

by the time you get around to doing this your Bitcoin will have gone up x-fold dwarfing the 5%.

Does really someone eat gluten-free foods if they don't actually need them? Sure, if you have a disease and you cannot eat gluten obviously you will eat them, but otherwise?

Yeah, what's with the 5% processing fee?

Much like what happens with gluten-free foods or brand name clothes; they're probably throwing an extra few percent on there because they consider it a "novelty" "niche" item that people will pay more for in the same way they'll pay more for a coffee at Starbucks just because it's Starbucks or some gluten-free foods have an additional margin placed on them for "niche value" (I'm talking beyond the required difference due to actual higher production costs) because of the hipster crowd. I guess we'll find out if it's successful, lol.

Don't get your panties all up in a bunch about it, bears. The free market will decide. If people will swallow the 5% fee because it's too much of a hassle getting money out Gox or will pay the 5% fee just for the convenience of using bitcoin, well, I would agree with you that they are very stupid people; I'd rather buy from a store that doesn't charge extra because of the hipster value. But who am I to argue with the free market? For all I know, there are loads of idiots out there that will give them record bitcoin sales that they will then brag about like Amagi Metals likes to do (hey guys we made $220,000 in bitcoin sales in one day in April) thus increasing exposure to bitcoin.

Hopefully, there are also loads of smart consumers who will send angry emails demanding that they reduce the Bitcoin processing fee to equal or less than the other services.

It saves you the time-consuming process of getting fiat out of gox.

Which is obviously not the case if you go on their website and place an order, and reach the "payment methods" page

It should be cheaper in bitcoins, not more expensive 

Which is true.

According to that article, Mt Gox is based in the United States.

What's the point of buying anything with bitcoin on DigiDeals (5 % extra fee)?


If you have btc: you'd better sell them on mtgox and them pay DigiDeals with paypal / credit cards or bank wire ... 
If you don't have btc: you should not bother buying them. 

You guys buy according to the present, not the future. Then you shouldn't be here at all, Bitcoin is all about future.
Gyft, Humble Bundle and now DigiDeals accept Bitcoins, I see more and more adopters of Bitcoin coming after the infrastructure is improved.

Of course, all prices are in USD, what do you think?



+ you forget to mention that:


   


+ 5 %

Probably yet another fake Bitcoin adopter using Bitpay

Does not imply that prices will/should go up