
Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin - mrb
http://promotions.newegg.com/nepro/14-3540/index.html
======
blhack
Reading these comments is depressing. Bitcoin isn't a few geeks trading bits
over IRC anymore, guys.

To some of the common bitcoin concerns:

1) They're easy to steal! Look at this person who did $something_stupid and
had all their coins stolen!

Yeah, sure...and if you had left $10,000 in cash just sitting on your table,
the _same_ thief could have stolen that as well. There are stories every
single day of people having cash stolen from them. The people keeping that
much value _stored on their local machine_ are usually pretty crazy bitcoin
evangelicals. These are not normal people who bought some coins on coinbase.

2) It doesn't do $things_credit_cards_do!

No, it doesn't! What you people seem to be missing is that _it 's a totally
new way of transferring value_. It has its own quirks, requires its own
security models, etc. It also does $things_credit_cards_dont_do! That's why
people have an interest in it!

~~~
sanswork
1) What are the best practises for having a bunch of bitcoin? You say you
shouldn't keep it stored on your local machine but where? Keeping it stored on
exchanges is kind of prone to failure in the bitcoin world. If you want to use
a cold wallet you need a second computer that you don't plan to use for
anything else and you need to learn linux or its pointless

2) Just because its new doesn't mean its better or makes more sense than the
existing methods.

~~~
recycleme
1) look up paper wallets.

bitcoin is at a stage where it's not trivial to secure if you are not a
technical person. There are companies that are working at making this easier
by providing the security and even insuring the bitcoins if something happens.
When services like this are out we will see a huge turning point IMO.

~~~
bdamm
I've been looking for a liveCD based offline paper-wallet solution, but so far
no luck. Perhaps someone can point me to one? The point is to generate a paper
wallet on a machine with no capability of retaining the keys after the paper
wallet has been generated - and the only way I know how to do that is through
the removal of hardware (no hard drive, no USB stick, no networking. Maybe no
speaker either.)

------
sanswork
Pay 1% more(or 3%-8% more if you have a cash back card and depending on where
you bought your coins) to save them 2% and lose all consumer protections in
the deal.

It's no wonder there is almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world while
new merchants are announced every other day.

~~~
oleganza
Paying in Bitcoin makes a lot of sense:

1) You don't have to provide private info like CC number.

2) If you bought bitcoins at X and now they are valued at 10X you may
effectively enjoy 90% discount on all purchases.

All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by
consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling
refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC details got stolen and
used by someone else. Of course, bitcoin payments do not leak your private
keys, so the entire class of problems goes away.

~~~
chrismorgan
And if you bought bitcoin at 10X and they are now valued at X you may
effectively enjoy paying 1000% of asking price on all purchases.

~~~
NSEDhom
The vast majority of Bitcoin purchases happened at below the current market
value. Which I guess is what makes people so bitter they didn't buy earlier?

------
sillysaurus3
Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they
convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third
party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to
safely store their coins themselves?

This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving.
Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't make
them learn a labyrinthian set of rules, or worry about what's dangerous or
what isn't. Protect consumers, and bitcoin adoption will follow. Large-scale
bitcoin adoption _can 't_ occur until bitcoin is made safe.

Did you hear about the guy who took his macbook into an Apple store for some
routine repairs, and one of their employees made off with his 15 BTC? The
employee hooked his harddrive up to a different computer, scanned it for a
"wallet.dat" file, saw it was unencrypted, and robbed him. Was it dumb of this
customer not to be using encryption? Yes. On the other hand, was it dumb of
him to be storing so much wealth in bitcoin right now, given how easy it is to
lose your money? Objectively, yes.

This isn't an insurmountable problem, but people have to start working on it
in order to solve it.

~~~
mcherm
Your question doesn't make sense to me.

> when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert
> their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party
> service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to
> safely store their coins themselves?

As you point out in your own statement, there are companies meeting the need
for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase and they are an excellent example
of a company doing that well and being quite successful at it.

You apparently reject them because working with Coinbase requires the customer
to "trust their coins to a third party service". Trusting the third party
service is pretty much mandatory for using ANY third party service. Imagine a
hypothetical service that provided "turnkey" software to store wallets on your
own computer -- you would still need to fully trust the provider of this
service to ensure that they actually stored the money rather than siphoning it
off someplace else.

The only way to (mostly) avoid having to trust a third party is to avoid using
a "turnkey" solution that is fully packaged without user serviceable parts.
You would instead need to learn on your own how to safely store the coins
yourself. Which is ALSO a choice, and many people do it. You complain that it
takes "a solid week" to learn how to do this -- and indeed, it does take a few
days to become an expert on any subject; there are 10 minute tutorials, but I
presume you (rightfully) reject them as being insufficient to really teach a
user enough to be fully safe.

Honestly, I think that you are just being unreasonable in your expectations.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list
Coinbase and they are an excellent example of a company doing that well and
being quite successful at it._

And if Coinbase goes bankrupt, all their users lose all their money.

I've written about this extensively several times before, so I won't rehash
the old points. But the summary is, if you trust your money to an entity that
doesn't have insurance, you're being very, very brave. Coinbase can go
bankrupt for a multitude of reasons, some of which aren't fair.

One could counter this with, "Don't store very much money in Coinbase." Sure,
but then consumers don't have much money on hand to buy things on a whim,
which reduces consumer adoption. That's why I've been saying: Make bitcoin
safe, and adoption will follow.

~~~
ThomPete
So can a bank and you will loose all your money just ask the people of Cyprus.

Bitcoin has been around for 4 years banks for several hundreds.

Your point is true but trivial and hardly says anything conclusive or useful
other than you don't trust 3rd parties.

With time you wont have to.

~~~
AnIrishDuck
> So can a bank and you will loose all your money just ask the people of
> Cyprus.

This is a silly comparison. In the USA, all deposits under $200k are
guaranteed by the FDIC [1]. If the bank folds, you still get your money from
the federal government. I imagine many similar institutions exist in other
countries.

Why there was no such institution in Cyprus baffles me. Perhaps they haven't
had to deal with institutional bank failures before. The point is that
deposits in Coinbase or other bitcoin institutions are not covered by any such
insuring body. They are hence inherently far riskier.

It all comes down to likelihood of failure. When institutions like coinbase
fail, we call that "thursday". But if the FDIC folds, you should be less
worried about your money and more concerned about hoarding ammo and
cigarettes.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDIC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDIC)

~~~
foobarqux
The Cyprus banks didn't fail, the government confiscated a fraction of account
balances. The FDIC guarantee wouldn't help you in that situation or many other
types of national calamities.

------
twodayslate
This seems pretty huge for Bitcoin. Newegg sells much more than computer parts
now. Glad to see that Newegg is headed back more to their roots though

~~~
gcb0
i would rather see they dump the crappy products that now dominates their
catalog and amazon's.

the world does not need yet another 500 models of USB powered ventilators.

------
throwaway5752
Newegg itself is not accepting Bitcoin, it is not keeping a balance in
Bitcoin, and it has no exposure to Bitcoin related risk.

It has a payment processor, Bitpay, that accepts Bitcoin. As long as you have
a competent engineer on staff, it's about as difficult as accepting PayPal.

It's nice that this is happening, but the headline should be, "BitPay lands
Newegg as client". The maturity of the services around Bitcoin helps everyone
that holds them, so it's not unimportant. It's just a very, very far stretch
from a merchant directly accepting and holding a currency balance in BC.

~~~
aroch
> it's about as difficult as accepting PayPal

Hah! Bitpay fails often, and it fails in mysterious ways. Manual intervention
on up to 10% of payments is no beuno.

------
ThomPete
A lot of people are missing the point with these large sellars accepting
bitcoin. It's not that they expect sales to explode but rather they want to
experiment and get a feel for how it works.

There will be a time where crypto-currency will be as normal as paying with
credit card or cash.

~~~
sanswork
Or they see overstock getting a lot of press out of it and want on board.

------
pistle
Coinbase and BitPay signing up new retailers doesn't provide me additional
belief that bitcoin is viable. The retailer doesn't believe in bitcoin. They
get cash out ASAP.

For a retailer, if they think they can move units by partnering with someone
who will convert BC to cash, sure whatever. It's like adding PayPal.

You don't see the 10,000,000 new consumers bought bitcoins!!! Who knew
cryptocurrency could burn holes in pockets!??!?! articles because that's not
happening.

The real problem was never "people don't have a place to spend bitcoin." It
was "people don't have time or risk tolerance to manage bitcoin."

~~~
jafaku
Every time Bitcoin makes a first step, haters will ask "but where is the
second step?".

By the way, Overstock is now holding bitcoins (about 3% of their Bitcoin
sales). I wouldn't be surprised if Newegg did the same after some time.

------
ghshephard
Pretty amazing - I went and made a purchase on NewEgg using CoinPocket on my
iphone - total time for transaction was under 10 seconds, including the time
to scan the QR code, click send, and have Newegg recognize I'd sent payment.

CoinPocket / NewEgg were within $0.15 of their exchange amounts on a $31.89
purchase. So, CoinPocket thought it was $31.89 that I was sending, and NewEgg
thought I was sending $31.74.

All in All - Bitcoin made purchasing a lot more easy than having to type in a
Credit Card number or login to Paypal.

------
BenC88
Could somebody explain the reasoning behind "customers have 15 minutes to
complete their bitcoin payment before their invoice expires"

~~~
nly
Bitcoin is decentralised, so, from Neweggs perspective, the transaction is
never completed 'online'. Their payment processor (I'm guessing it's going to
be Bitpay) has to wait until they see your transaction on the Bitcoin network
before they tell Newegg that it's paid. Think of it as waiting for a cheque to
arrive. A timeout is just sensible so you're not reserving stock.

~~~
beaner
That's not what the timer is referring to. The 15 minute timer is in place due
to the exchange rate. Newegg prices their items in dollars, BitPay converts it
to a BTC price and presents that price to the user. They can't show that same
BTC price forever, becasue if the price of bitcoin drops by 50% over 24 hours,
and you decide to leave your window open and order then instead of now, you
will get whatever you are buying for half the price. Bitpay guaranteed the USD
price that was set on the item to the merchant. Now they owe it, but have only
collected half. Thus Bitpay would be out hundreds of dollars (or whatever half
your order is). Similarly, if the price rose by 100% over 24 hours you could
accidentally pay double. So they put a timer on it.

~~~
logicallee
If it's a moving spot price that lasts just 15 minutes, is the exchange market
deep enough to keep people from abusing this?

By placing a huge number of buy orders at a time when the market is quite
shallow, all within a few minutes (temporarily driving the exchange price up
sharply) the BTC-denominated price of goods on Newegg can become very low in a
15-minute windows.

Huge numbers of orders ($millions) could then be placed at that low BTC price,
included by a distributed group of people.

What protects against this? Moving the price for 15 minutes seems quite
plausible but I don't know the details - and am not an expert.

~~~
DSMan195276
Honestly, the price of the BTC is decently stable, I wouldn't expect anything
to happen which would effect their prices enough to make a difference within a
15-minute window.

Ex. The Bitcoin is on an uptrend and went up 30$ in the window between when I
checked it ~8 hours ago and just now. Even if it managed to do that in a
15-minute window of time, that's only 30-dollars off of every 600 dollars you
spend. A 100$ dollar order will only see a 5 dollar 'discount'. And if it goes
the other way, they make a bit more, so over time I'm guessing it'll mostly
even out, Maybe a bit more in the consumers favor if we assume the BTC price
will end-up going up.

~~~
logicallee
I mean, e.g. buying $800K worth of bitcoin in 15 minutes, so that you can
increase the price and then buy $5M worth of goods NewEgg - would $800K in
fifteen minutes press newegg's btc-denominated price well below wholesale on
those same electronic goods?

~~~
sp332
The lower graph here shows the depth of the market. Right now, for $800k USD,
you can move the price from $656/BTC to $665/BTC. So you might get a $67,700
discount on your $5,000,000 order.

Edit: spaced the link
[https://bitcoinity.org/markets](https://bitcoinity.org/markets)

~~~
logicallee
This is good, let's analyze a bit more. It sounds like you know what you're
doing. (I don't.)

1\. Note you get bitcoins during your manipulation as well - so how much did
you overpay for the bitcoins that it took to get you the $67K discount? I
count that you achieved a 1.37% rise in price, so even if you put in your full
$800K at the higher price, that cost you $10,960 in overpayment. There is a
direct relationship between the amount of move that you cause, and the amount
that you overpay. So the question is, what that relationship is - we have to
compare it with the profits from the NewEgg orders at the manipulated price.

1b. Also note that there is a chance you can sell some of them back at a
slightly increased price if NewEgg confirms your order quickly, as you've just
filled all the lower-price bids on the exchange you just manipulated.

If nobody knows about your manipulation directly, you might even cause a bull
run where people think the price is just going to go up and up - you only
meant to manipulate it to a brief target price, not caring about the price
fall after, but maybe you can sell at a profit as a follow-on effect.

2\. On the other hand, $67,700 discount on $5M order is nothing – it doesn’t
cause the price to fall below wholesale, so there’s no reason to do the
manipulation, since NewEgg isn’t offering cash, it’s offering product. The
question then becomes: how much would we have to increase „1a” (the $10K ”fee”
you paid for a 1.37% drop) by, to cause an, e.g., 15% drop, 20% drop, 25%
drop, 30% drop, 35% drop, 50% drop, 75% drop, 80% drop, 95% drop. That would
be interesting in table form. The drop would have to be high, as the
manipulator would have to get product below wholesale price.

3\. $5M is not an upper limit. In a distributed way, there’s no way many
customers couldn’t place $10M in orders together. However, they would to
coordinate and play ball with each other: if any of them knows that
manipulation will happen trying to corner a shallow exchange market, they can
take the other side of the transaction. If they know that at a certain time,
$15M will be spent on manipulating the spot price for 15 minutes, they can
just set aside $15M to place on asks on the other side. So it’s quite
dangerous, especially if the price movement is intended to be high. The
element of surprise would have to be high.

This seems mostly a theoretical exercise, as in practice NewEgg could fail to
honor prices that are outside the previous day’s intraday, or that sort of
thing.

Still, I'm curious how the numbers would work.

