Bitcoin Believers
While regulators debate the pros and cons of bitcoins, this volatile digital currency inspires the question: What makes money, money?
By Channon Hodge, David Gillen, Kimberly Moy and Aaron Byrd on Publish Date November 24, 2013.Soon, you may be able to pay for your next Uber ride with Bitcoin.
Braintree, the payments processing company owned by eBay, said Monday that its customers would soon be able to accept Bitcoin, the digital currency popular in some tech and finance circles.
The company, which eBay bought for $800 million in cash one year ago, is considered a more developer-friendly division of PayPal, eBay’s online payments behemoth. Many of Braintree’s clients are tech start-ups like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, businesses that are looking for easy ways to integrate payments into their products for a low cost.
“It feels like we’re at the right moment in time now that a lot of those early problems with Bitcoin have been solved,” Bill Ready, chief executive of Braintree, said on stage Monday at the TechCrunch Disrupt technology conference in San Francisco.
Many companies have been slow to adopt the fledgling digital currency, which has stunted potential growth; because so few companies accept it, consumers are less likely to adopt and regularly use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has some upside for merchants willing to accept it, including lower transaction fees than credit cards. Because of this, some major consumer Internet companies are starting to toe the waters. Overstock.com, an online retailer, began accepting Bitcoin payments this year. Expedia, the online travel booking site, also accepts the alternative currency, as does the computing giant Dell Inc.
The move is not surprising for Braintree, whose clients include many tech companies whose customers are more likely to be early adopters of the new currency.
Mr. Ready did not specify which Braintree clients would eventually accept Bitcoin, but said that customers should expect to hear more in the coming months.