You Can Now Buy Some Discounted Home Goods With Bitcoin

Overstock.com is now accepting payments in bitcoin, making it the first major online retailer to embrace the increasingly popular but controversial digital currency.

Since December, Overstock’s free-thinking CEO and chairman, Patrick Byrne, has been telling anyone who would listen that his company would adopt bitcoin sometime in the next six months. But Byrne is an impatient man. Last Tuesday, the company struck a deal to handle bitcoin payments through a service operated by the suddenly hot San Francisco startup Coinbase, and since then, a team of Overstock engineers has worked almost every waking hour to prepare the site for what is undeniably a key moment in the digital currency’s short history.

“I felt I had tipped my hand,” Byrne says. “I didn’t want someone else to beat us.”

There has been a lot of buzz around bitcoin, and much of it lately has been about how the booming currency is forming a bubble that will crash spectacularly, but Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has faith in the digital currency because it’s untethered by “self-interests of banks and governments.” It also crashed and dropped in value by 25 percent a few weeks ago, so I still remain a skeptic. But hey, if you have some bitcoin, you can get some great bedding on Overstock right now!

i’m going to save my .01 bitcoin, forget that i have it and then one day wake up a millionaire. is that how it works?

— LW (@lindseyweber) December 23, 2013

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.