The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin Page #9

of bitcoin's price

out of the equation

for merchants

by immediately converting

bitcoins to dollars

at the time of sale.

So right now we have

it set to 100% dollars,

so anybody that

pays here with bitcoin,

they'll deposit the money

into your bank account

the very next day

with only a 1% fee.

And I guarantee you

over the next couple of weeks

you'll have

lots of computer nerds

that love bitcoins

will be coming in here

specifically to shop

at your supermarket,

so that they can pay

with bitcoin.

The credit card companies,

just for processing the payment,

they take anywhere from...

1.5% to over 3%

and then on certain cards

there's even

a per-transaction fee,

like 20 per transaction

plus the percentage

of the transaction.

...$11,000, $12,000 a month

on the average that they just

take right out of our account.

I honestly think that

there's a really good chance

that bitcoins will be

more than $1,000

by the end of the year,

because everybody who hears about...

"wait, I can send money

to and from anyone I want?"

It's impossible for anyone

to freeze your account,

it's impossible for anyone to block you

from sending or receiving these bitcoins.

...Euros,

so you can see

all these different currency

exchanges around the world

that exchange

to and from bitcoins.

You can see there's maybe between

50 and 100 exchanges now.

When I first heard about bitcoin and

started telling everybody about it,

if you looked at that same page,

there were less than 10.

And there's no central office that

they could raid or anything like that?

There's no central...

it's amazing.

There's no central office,

there's no central place

they could go to

and say,

"take Steve's bitcoins,"

or, "give Steve's bitcoins to Kevin."

Do this or do that.

So who's the owner

of bitcoins?

- Everybody that owns bitcoins?

- Yeah yeah.

Just like who's the owner of gold?

It's whoever owns some gold.

Short of shutting down

the entire Internet

in the entire world,

there's no way to stop bitcoin.

And hit "request payment."

And that's the q.R. Code

for your bitcoin address.

So I'm gonna scan that...

So now I have your bitcoin

address on my phone.

I think this is $2,

so I'm going

to send you $2

worth of bitcoins.

There it is.

You just received that many bitcoins

from me,

directly with no fee

and if you hit

the little green square

it'll show you the equivalent

amount in U.S. dollars.

So you just received

$2 worth of bitcoins

directly from my phone

to your phone.

And you can send money just like

that anywhere in the world.

You could've told me

your bitcoin address

by email or posted

on Facebook

or Twitter or anywhere.

So I could print this

and have it at the register.

Yeah. Yup, and you can

check right on your phone

any time that you

received the payment.

- ( LAUGHS )

- Okay. Thank you, Steve.

- STEVE:
All right. Thanks.

- Thank you for the tea.

( CHATTING )

DANIEL:
One of the newest

standouts in the bitcoin space

is a San Francisco company

named coinbase.

They operate

a digital wallet service

that makes it simple to buy,

use and accept bitcoin.

BRIAN ARMSTRONG:

I would not be surprised at all

if Google, square, PayPal...

everybody...

is looking at adding bitcoin

in one or two years.

By then we need to have

50 million wallets.

If we can make this

easy to use,

it's gonna be huge.

FRED EHRSAM:
My involvement in

bitcoin is not politically motivated.

- Yeah, dude. - EHRSAM: People are

realizing large capital gains.

When professional

investors enter the realm,

the stakes

definitely change.

We raised $5 million

from union square ventures.

Fred Wilson led

the round there.

I think bitcoin is still

actually a little bit

under the radar.

I think it's moved past the

stage where people dismiss it,

but I don't think

that it's totally

gone mainstream either.

I think we're in that

middle stage right now.

DANIEL:

At the end of the conference,

jered from tradehill

threw a party

to celebrate

how far things had come.

- You guys are hot right now.

- ( CHATTERING )

- Yup.

- Congratulations on the raise.

- Thank you.

- It's good money, man.

- Swell do.

- Yeah.

I mean... - hopefully it's an

advancement for the community.

I am completely

pro-compliance.

I think if you don't want

to attach your identity to this,

- just can't work with you.

- Yeah, so I thought I just need to...

I mean the libertarian side of me is like,

"ehh. Yeah, whatever,"

but like,

from a business perspective,

if people don't play

by the rules,

- you're not gonna last.

- Yeah, I completely agree.

- You're gonna just shut down or you're

gonna go to jail. - Yeah.

DANIEL:

Noticeably absent from the conference

were representatives

of bitcoin's

biggest exchange, mt. Gox.

Just days earlier the

department of homeland security

seized more than $5 million

from their U.S. accounts.

The seizure warrant stated

that mt. Gox had failed

to register

as a money transmitter,

putting them in violation

of the new fincen guidelines.

( PEOPLE CHATTERING )

I'm traveling to Tokyo

to meet mark karpeles,

mt. Gox's reclusive c.E.O.

No bitcoins on here.

Not yet.

That will make this

completely unnecessary.

But for now it seems

kind of primitive

that we're exchanging

paper for paper.

- ( CLICKING )

- ( COINS CLINKING )

- NICK:
And losing.

- And losing value.

Someone's taking a cut.

Someone's taking a little percent.

Mark and his

business partner gonzague

are French but they operate

mt. Gox from offices in Japan.

Originally mt. Gox was

an exchange for trading cards

used in a game called

"magic:
The gathering."

M.T.G.O.X. Stood for

"magic:
The gathering

online exchange."

In 2011

mark's company tibanne

bought mt. Gox,

and his focus has been bitcoin ever since.

One of the conditions

of my visit

is to refrain

from any discussion

about the d.H.S. Seizure,

due to the ongoing

investigation.

We've arrived at mt. Gox.

This is

mt. Gox right here.

There's no big sign

or anything, no... no...

it doesn't look like a crazy

commercial establishment.

Despite

their legal problems

mt. Gox still handles more

volume than any other exchange

and is processing around

$6 million worth

of bitcoin trades every day.

We had, last year,

an average of 10,000 new customers a month.

January, it was 20,000.

Then 30,000, 60,000,

150,000.

With what's going on,

we go down,

but we are reaching

100,000 new customers

- for may.

- That's amazing.

- In a month?

- In a month.

- Wow.

- So it was like this...

Zip, bup!

But still,

after what happened

I thought that a lot

of people will go away

or don't create

a new account.

But still,

100,000 new customers

it's... wow.

And here we've got

the office.

( LAUGHS )

DANIEL:

Mt. Gox employs 18 people

not only is mark the c.E.O.,

he's also the c.F.O.,

the lead developer

and performs all technical operations

to keep the exchange running.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes