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“This is a huge boost for Bitcoin—this is the first time that a well-known company is taking Bitcoin,” Jerry Brito, a researcher at George Mason University, who has studied Bitcoin extensively, told Ars.
“The fact that a company like WordPress is taking Bitcoin, it shows that [the currency] is widespread enough to trust it, but I wonder after a year if they can tell us how much of their revenue will be paid in Bitcoin... It's going to introduce a lot of people to Bitcoin and it’s a vote of confidence.”
WordPress explained that it wants to make it easier for its customers—who might be buying a $5 custom design, for example—to pay for those goods.
“PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions,” wrote Andy Skelton, a WordPress developer, in a blog post. “Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.”
Skelton also wrote that WordPress would honor its refund policy in Bitcoin.
In recent months, despite pressure from law enforcement, the Bitcoin community has tried to make itself more legitimate—a new foundation and debit card are already in the works.
BitPay, not WordPress, takes all the risk
WordPress made clear that it is not actually holding Bitcoins, nor is it mining for new ones. Rather, it’s using a Bitcoin processor, BitPay, to handle that part of the transaction.“We’re insulating the business from the volatility risk,” Tony Gallippi, BitPay’s CEO, told Ars.
He explained that when a payment is made via Bitcoin, BitPay processes it, then converts the amount into US dollars at the moment the transaction is made. Then, the following day, BitPay sends a payment to WordPress, in dollars, in a single lump sum of all the transactions from the previous day—while taking a 2.69 percent fee, of course.
So far, Gallippi says that while BitPay does work with 1,500 other smaller companies, WordPress is now certainly the most well-known. He also hopes that the new arrangement could pave the way for future deals with other companies.
“Personally I’ve talked to hundreds of businesses and they look at what we have and they say that nobody is asking for Bitcoin, and to please come back when it’s more popular,” he told Ars.
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