Bitcoin News

Marc Hochstein (@MarcHochstein), executive editor of American Banker, describes how Bitcoin is setting a bar that banks may be hard pressed to meet.  Excerpts:

“In addition to being a store of value, [Bitcoin is] also a means of exchange, a payment system that can perform many of the same functions as banks and as financial services companies like Western Union, PayPal and Visa. And its efficiency as such is arguably a more important reason for bankers to pay attention to it.”
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“A few restaurants and bars take it. You can even donate bitcoins to WikiLeaks. But you can’t spend bitcoins at Amazon or Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or pay your electricity bill with them.”
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“Linking [Bitcoin] to a prepaid card, [Bradley Leimer] says, is ‘a little bit of a game-changer,’ since it’s ‘a much more mainstream way to move the value within your bitcoin collection’.”
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“I didn’t have to give my name, much less show ID, throughout the whole process [of buying bitcoins through BitInsant].”
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“Transacting off the [banking system] grid should remain an option even after we phase out paper bills and metal coins.”

- http://bit.ly/R7QvHd
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=103048.0 (Further discussion of the article)

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