Merchants: Bitcoin is a Hassle Posted by AVCU on 4:35 PM

As follow-up to our the coverage last week about virtual currency Bitcoin being featured on CBS' The Good Wife, American Banker sought the real life opinion of merchants. They found that one scene from the TV series rang particularly true. "We’re not going to do much more with Bitcoin,” a fictional hotel manager says. “I thought it would be cool, but it is a bit of a hassle.”

The fictional hotel manager appears to be based on one of Bitcoin’s real-life poster boys: Jefferson Kim, who manages a Howard Johnson Hotel in Fullerton, CA, who was quoted in an October issue of The New Yorker expressing his fascination with the decentralized, peer-to-peer currency. American Banker tracked down Kim who told them that the only Bitcoin transaction he handled was the one that the New Yorker writer insisted on using to pay for his stay at the Howard Johnson. Kim says it was a big hassle, and it goes like this:

The reporter transfers regular cash to one of the Bitcoin exchanges. He then transfers the Bitcoins to Kim, who in turn exchanges them once back into dollars in order to transfer them to the hotel’s deposit account. The hotel manager would have preferred a credit card.

Bitcoin replaces currency and is an encrypted computer file whose movements from person to person can be tracked publicly without naming the spender or recipient. Merchants don't pay interchange to a bank. There are few reports, however, of Bitcoin actually being used to pay for items. That makes Bitcoin more of a commodity as it is traded and held. About 200,000 Bitcoins are traded daily, which equals about $1 million.

See the American Banker original article here.