Topic: Is bitpay necessary for mainstream adoption? (Read 556 times)

Yes, bitpay and coinbase are helping to exchange those coins into fiat instantly because of the current volatility, if some merchant sell a million of goods via bitcoins and the price crashes, how will they pay the providers? at least at this point they are quite necessary.

Bitpay and Coinbase are indeed necessary *right now*. We're still quite early: bitcoin is new, price-discovery is rapid and aggressive, and therefore volatility is very high. Yet there's currently no institutionally acceptable way to hedge bitcoin's exchange-rate risk, so most merchants, especially large ones, are going to consider it imprudent to hold non-trivial bitcoin balances.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, has said that once US regulated exchanges/futures-markets exist for bitcoin, they'll hold more and just hedge the positions.

That said, it's worth noting that Overstock does currently retain 10% of their bitcoin sales as bitcoin (and a large Malaysian retailer announced the other day that they're holding 100% of bitcoin sales as bitcoin: http://www.coindesk.com/malaysian-online-retailer-accepts-bitcoin-wont-convert-fiat-currency/ )

I believe Overstock also said that they're going to try and get suppliers to take bitcoin, which will help. But again, both Overstock and the supplier would probably like to hedge the exchange rate risk, so back to waiting for the futures market.

The other side of the loop that really needs to be closed is payroll. The more companies that let employees opt to receive some percentage of pay in bitcoin, the less conversion necessary. I know blockchain.info pays all employees fully in bitcoin, and I believe Coinbase does too (at least partially). Also note that BitPay has a payroll-api product: https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-payroll-api

Anyways... These things take time. For the moment, bootstrapping this economy requires most btc-accepting merchants to convert to fiat because they're not in the business of speculating on currencies. Eventually, products will come along allowing merchants to easily hedge their risk, and/or bitcoin volatility in general will be far less than today, and we'll see both the supplier and employee loops close to some extent.

Corporate hands need to be held for now. A service like Bitpay might one day be the stepping stone to an enclosed BTC economy.

Not in the short term, too much risk for merchants without it.  At the very least services like BitPay and Coinbase will help accelerate merchant adoption.

Yes, someday^tm.  Actually, there's a Malaysian merchant that recently decided to hold btc instead of converting:
http://www.coindesk.com/malaysian-online-retailer-accepts-bitcoin-wont-convert-fiat-currency/

Is this service necessary for mainstream adoption?
Yes

Can bitcoin succeed without an intermediate service like bitpay that converts to fiat?
No

Will bitcoin eventually just be kept and not converted to fiat (right away)?
Maybe

http://www.coindesk.com/former-visa-exec-join-bitpay-chief-compliance-officer/

http://newsbtc.com/2014/06/09/bitpay-names-visa-veteren-tim-byun-chief-compliance-officer/

Bitpay is being used by companies as a way to work with bitcoin (and to convert to fiat). Is this service necessary for mainstream adoption? They already hired the former visa executive as their chief compliance officer.

Can bitcoin succeed without an intermediate service like bitpay that converts to fiat?
Will bitcoin eventually just be kept and not converted to fiat (right away)?

Thoughts appreciated.