Guild Wars 2

I can’t see this going over well.

Quality may be in the eye of the beholder. I would not support paying a mandatory subscription, nor am I convinced a subscription removes all bugs.

http://www.digitalriver.com/our-company/newsroom/press-release/global-ecommerce-provider-digital-river-now-accepting-bitcoin/

WALL OF TEXT AHEAD

There is a lot of misinformation in this thread, that I prefer not to comment directly on. For now I want to lay out some facts (I will mark my opinions as necessary in parenthesis) to clear up misconceptions about Bitcoin for ANet. “Merchants” refer to ArenaNet, and “Customers” refer to us players:

• Volatility has no impact to merchants due to services like BitPay and Coinbase which convert on-the-fly. (Given these services can pay you in your preferred currency, you can probably declare your revenue in said currency. Your experience may vary depending on local laws.)

• Using such service, while pricing in btc can vary, the price in dollars can be quoted to customers. (Merchants understand bitcoin’s volatility, which is why they rarely price their goods in actual btc. This makes bitcoin “not a currency” but a medium of exchange. Which is fine by the bitcoin community)

• PayPal charges 2.4% + $0.30 per transaction (quote is from Australia, not sure where to find USA/Europe), BitPay charges $30/mth to $300/mth, Coinbase charges 1%.
  e.g. $10 in gems = $9.46 through PayPal, $9.90 through Coinbase, BitPay requires you to achieve $3,000 to $30,000 in sales a month to break even with Coinbase. Enterprise subscription to BitPay might be cheaper/more expensive.

• Accepting pure bitcoins without immediate conversion is risky due to volatility. Therefore adopting a service like the above is better. (Also probably lets them worry about the tax implications of accepting bitcoin. You just worry about your revenue tax as per normal. Again local laws will vary) At the same time, pure bitcoins don’t suffer any transaction fee on the merchant side. As the exchange rate gets more stable in the future, it may make sense to switch (unless local laws are not favourable).

• Bitcoin isn’t anonymous. Transactions are publicly visible, and the moment you exchange a good or service for bitcoins, you usually need to enter your address for your items to ship to. Merchants usually require billing & shipping addresses for online/virtual goods anyway when taking credit cards, or in the case of PayPal where they already have the information in the customer’s accounts. (You can’t fund a terrorist with Gems, ever)

• You can’t do a charge back with Bitcoin. This removes the merchant’s need to disable accounts if a customer commits charge back fraud, because there is no charge back fraud. The risk is entirely on the customer’s side, as opposed to credit cards and PayPal where the risk is on the merchant side.

Given all the risk is on the customer side, why do they use Bitcoin? Well… (this section is ALL opinion, with some facts to back up my thought process.):

• A. People are fed up with the fiat system.

Governments print more money which devalues the currency. You don’t see how much it affects you because the money is spread out everywhere. But once they get piled into one location you’ll see how much money there is that you will feel it is worthless.

The US government is trillions in debt. The Germans in WW1 (or was it WW2?) printed money to bail out, and screwed over their system. There is the slightest risk the US government plans to do the same, but in a controlled, hidden manner. If someone can figure out the scheme or leak it to people like WikiLeaks, USD will plummet, if they can’t, then the US government wins.

The banking system fell over in the GFC, and Bitcoin was created in response to the bailouts. Why are organisations allowed to be bailed out anyway? It speaks ill of the fiat system, that you can always be forgiven if you make a critical, fatal mistake. There is the notion that the debt system has become “too big to fail”.

Most people probably don’t know when fiat money was introduced it was ridiculed, not praised. The fact when it stopped being banked by gold, people thought it stopped being valuable. Today, there is no intrinsic value of a USD. If USD can be backed by a non-tangible concept called “trust”, then so can Bitcoin. I trust bitcoins a lot more than I trust USD, but that might be my bias because I’m from Australia.

• B. People see it as an investment opportunity.

Bitcoin is said to be the first ever deflationary currency to exist because of its fixed supply. There’s two types of events that give rise to bitcoin growth. The first type is adoption. Over time, bitcoins will be spread across millions of people as goods and services are exchanged. It gets harder to get a bigger sum of bitcoins.

Every 4 years, bitcoins get harder to mint. By 40 years time, 95% of the bitcoins will be minted. This means at this point bitcoins will start to see a deflationary effect. Like fiat money, you can lose access to your bitcoins if you die of old age or carelessness, etc. and don’t pass it on.

(TBC)

Short answer: No.

Apparently you’re blind to the recent events with one of the more popular bitcoin sites going bankrupt and locking out “investors” from accounts worth hundreds of millions. Yes, Anet’s going to accept payment from a volatile, virtual, nonreal currency with a disgustingly large amount of risk over established mediums that transfer legitimate funds.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Apparently you’re blind to the recent events with one of the more popular bitcoin sites going bankrupt and locking out “investors” from accounts worth hundreds of millions. Yes, Anet’s going to accept payment from a volatile, virtual, nonreal currency with a disgustingly large amount of risk over established mediums that transfer legitimate funds.

What he said.

What you are asking for is too new anyway, regardless of the implications involved with BitCoin/LiteCoin/etc.

No, there is a reason the US Treasury is shutting down Bitcoin Operations one at a time. Its a influx way to launder Money and to pay for Crimes such as hits. Its a dirty Money business and does should NOT be used for things like GW2.

They don’t adjust with Euro to US Dollars and you expect them to set a price with a currency that fluctuates as much as Bitcoin?

If this Bitpay service is so good then why don’t you use it so you can pay via one of the ways NCSOFT/ArenaNet already supports?