It is nine degrees outside right now, which for where I live is basically arctic. The whole "polar vortex" thing everyone was talking about earlier this week finally got here, and I spent most of yesterday under a blanket with a space heater pointed at my feet instead of doing anything productive. So forgive me if this post is a little late going up.
Anyway. While half the tech press has spent the last four days live-blogging every gadget that rolled through the CES show floor in Vegas (curved TVs, more curved TVs, a smart onesie for babies, an oven that talks to your phone), I want to talk about something smaller that actually happened today and that I think matters more than another 4K television nobody's going to buy.
Overstock.com started accepting Bitcoin as payment today, January 9th. As in, right now, you can buy a patio umbrella or a mattress topper from Overstock and pay for it in Bitcoin instead of a credit card. Patrick Byrne, their CEO, has been talking this up for weeks, and he's apparently pretty serious about it, he's framed it almost as a political statement, something about getting out from under the banking system's thumb. I don't know that I buy the ideology part of it but I do think it's a genuinely interesting business move, and it's the first time I've seen a retailer this size actually do it instead of just talking about doing it.
Here's the part that's funny to me: Overstock isn't converting the risk onto themselves. They're using Coinbase to process the transactions, which means the second you pay in Bitcoin, Overstock gets dollars and Coinbase eats whatever the price does in the meantime. That's smart on Overstock's part honestly. Bitcoin's been all over the place in price, it was pushing something like $1,150 back in early December and now it's sitting closer to $850. If I were running a company selling patio umbrellas I would not want to hold onto a currency that can lose a quarter of its value between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Let somebody else take that risk.
I'll admit I don't own any Bitcoin myself. Not out of principle, I just never got around to it, and every time I read a forum thread about wallet security I get a headache and go do something else. But I like watching what happens when an actual retailer, not a coffee shop novelty and not some libertarian conference sideshow, starts taking it seriously. It's a different kind of validation than another exchange popping up or another guy on a podcast saying it's going to replace the dollar. Somebody wants to sell you a rug for it. That's a real use case, even if it's a small one.
I also think this is a much more interesting Bitcoin story than most of what gets written about it, because it isn't about the price. Every other Bitcoin article this month has been some version of "line goes up, line goes down, is this a bubble." Fine, sure, it might be. But the payment rail stuff, the part where regular commerce companies figure out how to bolt this onto their existing checkout flow without taking on currency risk themselves, that's the boring plumbing work that actually determines whether any of this sticks around in five years. Overstock plumbing a Bitcoin option into their checkout is more consequential to me than whatever wearable Intel's CEO strapped to a model at the CES keynote earlier this week (an SD-card sized computer chip called Edison, if you missed it, which honestly might turn out to be the more important announcement of the week and got buried under all the TV coverage).
I'm not going to sit here and tell you Bitcoin is going to take over online retail. I have no idea if this sticks. Overstock could quietly drop it in six months if the volume's not there, or if the regulatory picture gets uglier, which given how 2013 went with the Silk Road stuff and various state regulators making noise, it very well might. But for one Thursday in January, a company that mostly sells discount furniture and rugs did something that felt more forward-looking than most of what I saw scroll past from Las Vegas this week. Make of that what you will.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check whether my pipes are still not frozen.