Wednesday, September 30, 2015

MIT: The Troubles at Bitpay

Tom Simonite at MIT's Technology Review writes:
In 2014, a Bitcoin startup called BitPay raised $30 million from investors and was dubbed the “PayPal of Bitcoin” for helping companies such as Microsoft accept payments in the digital currency. But 2015 has been less kind. Last week BitPay made significant layoffs, and earlier in the month it admitted to having $1.8 million in Bitcoins stolen.

The company’s travails neatly demonstrate two problems with Bitcoin as a currency and payment mechanism.

First, no one much wants to pay with Bitcoin and there’s not currently good reason to think that will change. BitPay’s business model was to help merchants take Bitcoin payments—often converting them directly into dollars—and take a cut of transactions. The company has enabled Microsoft, retailer Newegg, and many other companies accept Bitcoin payments.

Unfortunately for BitPay, just about no one gets paid in bitcoins, and for most people there are not clear reasons to bother with the trouble of buying bitcoins just to spend them again. The people with the best incentive to buy stuff with the currency are those who bought it several years ago and are now cashing out their gains after Bitcoin’s rise in value.

BitPay’s CEO Stephen Pair admitted as much in June, when he told BusinessInsider that the company was trying to find another business model. “We keep adding merchants—we’re up to over 60,000 now—but they’re selling to the same pool of Bitcoin early adopters.”

Gavin Andresen, who in 2010 was picked by Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor to lead work on its code, recently told me that he didn’t see that changing soon (see “The Looming Problem That Could Kill Bitcoin”). “Until part of your paycheck is regularly paid in Bitcoin, I’m not sure how it would really go mainstream,” he said.

BitPay’s embarrassing loss of 5,000 Bitcoins worth $1.8 million, revealed in court documents this month, highlights another challenge facing both the company and the idea of Bitcoin as a currency. The thief was able to trick BitPay’s CEO into transferring the funds just by sending e-mails from the account of his CFO.

Like I said a long time ago, the enthusiasm for bitcoin was limited to some technology geeks and some libertarians who viewed  it as, somehow, as an alternative currnecy that would replace the dollar. It has not occurred.

 -RW

1 comment:

  1. RW, the state thanks you for your service in helping pillory any attempt to circumvent its monopoly on money. Keep up the good anti-Bitcoin work.

    ReplyDelete