They don't accept Bitcoin as Bitcoin. They only employ a third-party service to take Bitcoin on their behalf and exchange them for US dollars. It's not showing any trust in Bitcoin, just hopping on a bandwagon for PR.

How is that different from accepting credit cards via a third party?

If they had faith on the long-term future of BitCoin, they would have accepted them as BitCoins and stored them as some sort of an investment rather than immediately converting them to USD.

Companies don't like having their costs in one currency, and their revenue in another. It's called currency risk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_risk) and companies generally try to avoid it or hedge against it.

Isn't that a bit paradoxical? If the long term success of BitCoin rides on people using it to make transactions (e.g. paying for games by zynga), then what good is it for businesses to hoard large amounts of it for speculation?

It's still a method of accepting payment.

Don't forget that bitcoin is also a payment system.

Just goes to show, you don't need to trust bitcoin to use bitcoin ;)

I think the first half of your statement is true (employing a third-party service to take Bitcoin) but the second half (automatically exchanging them to USD) is an assumption that can change over time as Zynga gets comfortable managing Bitcoin.

I would think it's valuable for the entire Bitcoin network to have more merchants accepting it than less, so how is Zynga accepting Bitcoin a bad thing?

This is like arguing that accepting credit cards means you don't accept dollars, because no green pieces of paper are being exchanged.

They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are still only accepting USD: just making it easier for people with bitcoin to give USD to them.

What they do with the payment after receiving it is irrelevant. You can pay using bitcoin. It doesn't make any difference to the customer that it's going through another company and getting converted to USD

The thing to remember here is that people are changing USD > BTC, paying with BTC, and then that BTC is going back to USD. What's the point? This accomplishes nothing other than allowing Bitcoin exchanges to collect tx fees between customers and Zynga. It's non-conducive to adoption.

On the other hand, if Zynga were holding BTC, paying employees in BTC, and those employees started consuming with BTC, then they would actually be "using" it. Otherwise it's the same exact thing as punching in your credit card details.

Yes and I can pay for everything with euros in the United States by that logic. All I have to do is go to a friendly bank on the corner and convert to USD.

No, that's completely different logic.

You can pay for something with euros in the US as long as they accept it, even if after all they do is go to the bank and convert to USD.

> They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are not accepting real USD. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

hint: This is how merchant accounts with payment processors work.

I got into a public dispute with Max Keiser and his psychotic followers about this and people said it was semantics. There are three distinct moments: 1) Accepting Bitcoin (kudos to BitPay and Coinbase for making it so easy!), which is primarily a cheap PR move; 2) Having real commerce going thru this channel (i.e. volume as USD equivalent) - everybody seems shy about it; and 3) Truly accepting Bitcoin into a Bitcoin wallet!

This article speaks as if it was 100% certainty that Zynga's announcement caused the fluctuation. Doesn't feel entirely accurate.

I guess Bitcoin's finally made it to the big leagues.

It's similar to every single day's coverage of financial stocks -- "The stock is up 1% on the expected change in the price of tea in china."

Worthless.

That's the first impression I got from it as well.

I think there's another factor that is driving the price up more than anything else - serious hoarding by people who are just now beginning to understand the system and how it works.

I'm not sure they actually do. What people see is a virtual commodity that seems to be worth a lot of non-virtual money when bought low and sold high.

Ya, the Stossel Show on Fox re-aired at around the time of the spike and a Libertarian was telling a bunch of folks to get into Bitcoin. My hunch is this was more influential in getting ma & pop to invest in bitcoin given Fox's viewership.

Any talk like that is fundamentally flawed, because the market price is simply a reflection of individuals buying and selling. No one has the information about the motivations behind every single buy and sell.

Well, I heard it was primarily because of Sina launching a Bitcoin news portal.

I heard it was because the last Son of Nebulus, ruler of the Five Realms had returned.

It was most likely the Zynga announcement. 10M monthly users is quite something and there were no other relevant news around over the last couple of days.

The headline and the article do not propose causality, but coincidence.

Zynga didn't do this

But this is probably why they did it :)

Sell call. But I guess there is not much demand at this price.)

The price can only be that high if there is demand. The big question is the volume of the demand. If everybody suddenly starts selling, the price will quickly collapse again.

Not sure what I'll do. I bought mine at the low a few weeks ago, so this would already be unbelievable profit. But it might go up even further.

I'm thinking I'll give it another year before I sell. Only more companies are going to jump on the bandwagon, which means more money pouring into bitcoin and upping the value.

Obviously, nothing is certain, but I think altcoins have some serious growth potential over the next few years as they gain mainstream adoption.