Posts Tagged ‘Bitcoin (BTC)’

Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin Payments for Hotel Booking

12, Jun 2014

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Expedia, one of the largest online international travel agents, has announced that they are stating to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for hotel purchases. Expedia has partnered with Coinbase as the payment processor, just like another big company that recently announce their plans for starting to accept Bitcoin payments, namely Dish Network.

“Expedia, Inc. is in a unique position, as one of the world’s leading online travel agencies, to solve travel planning and booking for our customers and partners alike by adopting the latest payment technologies,” said Michael Gulmann, Vice President, Expedia Global Product. “We’re continually looking at ways consumers want to pay for their travel; bitcoin is a great example of how Expedia is investing early in an array of payment options to give our customers and partners more choice in the ways they interact with us.”

Expedia’s customers can easily find and select Bitcoin as a payment option at check-out along with all other methods accepted on the site, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, Diners Club and PayPal. To purchase hotel reservations using the newly accepted currency, customers simply indicate Bitcoin as their method of payment and then follow a few steps to safely and securely complete each transaction. Expedia will not collect or hold any Bitcoin from the payments they get, it will immediately convert all customer Bitcoin transactions into U.S. dollars as pretty much most other companies accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment do in order to minimize the risk of BTC price dropping.

On a side note, Google Finance has just launched a Bitcoin price tracker, not long after Yahoo! Finance has added a price ticker for BTC as well. This is a direct response to both the companies and their users gaining more interest in the crypto currency as it continues to get wider adoption.

Bitcoin Price has Risen Back Above $600 USD

30, May 2014

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It seems that the latest positive news such as DISH planning to add Bitcoin payments and the lack of trouble in China lately has allowed the Bitcoin price to start going high again and it has just broke the $600 USD price per Bitcoin. This hasn’t happened since March and the price of Bitcoin is getting close to double the recent bottom that it hit in April when it was down to a about $340 USD. Hopefully this time the Bitcoin exchange rate will remain high and more stable and not be caused to drop down due to some new commotion happening somewhere in the world.

What we are not seeing however is the growth of the exchange rate of Litecoin and with all of the Scrypt ASIC miners getting introduced and shipped to the market at the current exchange rate things do not look so bright for people that have purchased ASICs. In an effort to get the rest of the payment from people that have pre-ordered Scrypt ASICs from Alpha Technology they had to rise the advertised hashrate multiple times to get back the interest from the people. Otherwise a lot of people were considering to cancel their pre-orders, and even now with the new hashrates announced people that have pre-ordered Vipers are still carefully considering. It is easier with Scrypt ASIC miners that are already available as you know you are going to have them in a few days, so the calculations are easier to make.

With the recent spike in interest and price of DarkCoin and generally X11 crypto currencies, already most of the GPU miners have moved to mining X11 crypto coins. In fact lately many of the new coin launches are based on the X11 algorithm and people are already developing more interest in still the not so many X13 crypto algorithm coins as well. So GPU mining is not going to disappear anytime soon as miners just find other alternatives when ASIC miners start hitting the market and start making GPU mining unprofitable.

USCC Research Report: Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China

13, May 2014

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The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an organization created to monitor, investigate, and submit to the United States Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has published an interesting report. The research report is called Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China and covers what has happened in the world of Bitcoin in the last few months with China entering strongly the market and now slowly withdrawing from it and covers what can happen in the future with Bitcoin in China and how can that affect Bitcoin globally. If you haven’t been following what was going on in China regarding Bitcoin and how the Chinese government is apparently trying to affect Bitcoin trading in the country you can get up to speed by checking out the document that is freely available.

– To read the full USCC research paper Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China in PDF format…


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