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Re: How can we encourage local businesses to accept BTC?
by
lionheart78
on 04/11/2016, 02:13:14 UTC
However internet advertising of bitcoin can help local business if and only if they are themselves willing to accept it - which I am afraid from my own personal experience, not.
You cannot say that local businesses will not prefer adopt bitcoins. There are reasons why they are now willing and not willing to do so for now maybe one simple reason must be they know little or nothing about bitcoin. But, as time goes on, it will get to a time that most of those businesses will be begging you to pay them through bitcoin. I am sure those magic times will come in real soon.
The only reasons I can think of is that merchants either haven't heard of Bitcoin yet, or they are afraid to incorporate Bitcoin payments into their site due to the volatility. In case of the latter option, they are wrong.

Volatility isn't something merchants have to deal with as 95% of the merchants are using a payment processor to have all their Bitcoin sales converted to fiat directly. They don't risk anything.

I think that's something a lot merchants don't seem to realize. They probably think that when they sell something for $100 in BTC, and the price goes down, that they lose money.

If that's really the case, then more needs to be done to inform merchants about the benefits of having a payment processor such as BitPay to work for them.
Personally I think one of the bigger problems with bitcoin is that although is very easy to use, it can be difficult to grasp for the average person; the concept of an electronic currency with no government to back it up seems odd for the average person.

I agree this is one of the concern of the merchants.  Basically legit merchants wants to use things that are approved by the government so they don't have to worry about tax evasion and other issue that arise with non-compliance issue.  They also wanted their business to be covered with insurance so when something unexpecte happen they have someone to back them.  With bitcoin, there is no such thing as insurance company that will back you in case you got problem with bitcoin.