Merchant Integrations and Reddit

As those who closely follow Bitcoin are already aware, we launched with Reddit (top 100 US site) about two weeks ago to allow them to start accepting payment in Bitcoin. This was a natural progression for Bitcoin breaking in to the mainstream — Reddit collects relatively small payments from all over the world and has a tech savvy userbase. Reddit CEO Yishan Wong stopped by the offices to understand all things Bitcoin beforehand (which didn’t take him long as the former director of engineering at Facebook). This trend of merchants recognizing the large benefits of accepting bitcoin is something we believe will only pick up. Taking credit card payments as a baseline to compare against, Bitcoin eliminates the ~2.7% fixed fees, ~0.3% losses to chargebacks (and long tail of risk associated therein), FX costs, provides payments instantly, and creates higher conversion rates as another payment option. Weigh this against the touch of engineering time it takes to integrate, and the case to accept Bitcoin becomes pretty compelling.

We’ll likely publish a more formal list at some point, but 4chan (~550 million pageviews/month) was another notable early adopter. While there are still a few additions to make to the merchant tools (recurring payments being the highest on the list), the response thus far has been impressive. The same holds true for the API where people are taking advantage of the ability to buy, send, and accept Bitcoin all in one place — expect an exciting announcement from that front soon!