Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
To be honest you are assuming that they are not keeping a % of the payment in BTC with their payment processor.
Some merchants may do that (just as some merchants actuall accept bitcoin directly, without BitPay's intermediation). But I am pretty sure that Dell, Microsoft, Wikipedia, etc. do not. Handling bitcoins requires extra work from accoutants, which is not worth the amount of payment received. Losses from bitcoin price variations (as Overstock and Fortress suffered) would have to be reported in the quarterly reports, and would be hard to justify to stockholders.
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Also what is important to note is that BTC like USD,CAD,YEN,CHY,GBP and any other currency is being accepted for payment 
SIgh. No, it is not the same thing. Dell USA does accept USD, because you can wire USD to their bank account directly. They do not accept CAD,YEN,CHY,GBP nor BTC, and you cannot send them any of those currencies directly; you must send them to some other company, that converts them to USD and sends the USD to Dell.
Jorge, can't you see that we are arguing about what 'accepting' means? Everybody agrees about the model, the underlying chain of events that takes place during and after a payment (if a company chooses to get paid fully in fiat). It's just that when a company allows you to pay for products in BTC, I call that "accepting BTC", whereas for you "accepting" apparently means whatever you are getting paid by the payment processor at the end of the process.
I didn't follow the discussion leading to this, so maybe I'm out of line, but strangely it seems I'm siding with Stolfi on this. If we're talking about what it means to accept BTC I think we have to ask why we want companies to do that. In the end we'd like to see a purely Bitcoin-based economy with the companies using the BTC they're being payed with for their products to cover their cost (machinery, marketing, salaries, consulting, raw materials, insurance, taxes,...). In case of a company 'accepting' BTC through bitpay and converting 100% to fiat, this is clearly not the case.
So no: Dell is not accepting bitcoin. They're using it as a marketing tool.
If you or others can't see the significance of Dell, Microsoft and Paypal saying not only that they are interested in Bitcoin but that they consider it a sufficiently mature and legitimate medium of exchange that they are willing to accept it through their payments processors; then.... it doesn't matter because others will. We CAN get every business on the planet to accept and legitimize Bitcoin in this way, but we CAN'T get most companies to be bagholders.
There is no conceivable reason why Dell or Microsoft should accept Bitcoin directly. Even when Bitcoin is established enough for companies to transfer large sums between each other and internally, it wouldn't necessarily be very prudent to do that with bitcoins from customers. That would still go through payments processors and the management of their own bitcoins would be handled separately. Accepting payments through BitPay or Coinbase is to accept Bitcoin. Get over it!
Feel like the same arguments keep popping up over and over. Bitcoin currency vs bitcoin protocol. They're using bitcoin protocol to transfer wealth. This is good. Good news for protocol will (eventually) result in good news for currency.