ThinkPenguin now accepting Bitcoins with BitPay

ThinkPenguin's customers don't have to identify to ThinkPenguin or bitpay in order to pay ThinkPenguin in bitcoins (beyond providing shipping information anyhow).

You don't need to use BitPay to accept bitcoins as a business either. However your business is probably going to have to convert to hard currencies at some point or another (at least right now). That is where bitpay comes in. They are an exchange or work with one. No matter how you convert to USD your pretty much going to have to identify yourself. Even cash transaction have to be accounted for as far as the IRS is concerned and being anonymous doesn't solve that problem.

Trying to hide the profits is against the law and IRS agents will utilize various means to identify such efforts. As a simple example the IRS knows that a fast-food style restaurant business is going to have to buy cups and those cups are going to end up in customers hands. The business charges $x for each cup. Multiply the number of cups the business buys by the sale price and you will get an approximate number for the sales. If the business under reports the IRS with catch it via this means and do a further more extensive audit. While I'm sure you could work around this auditors have other means to generate approximate sales figures too. Simply sitting across the street and counting customers is an example.

When ThinkPenguin purchases a large quantity of product from a factory or distributor they ask for tax information. The IRS can connect the dots between your purchases and sales. If your purchasing a significant amount of something and the output doesn't align your going to have a problem.

So the reason a business would utilize bitpay is to automate the conversion of bitcoins to a hard and/or more stable currency while letting the user gain some level of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity.

That said there are other good reasons to accept it as well. The fees to convert from bitcoins to hard currencies is lower than accepting credit cards or paypal. Bitcoins are significantly less expensive to accept and reduce the risk of fraud. That lowers costs for a business like ThinkPenguin.

If there is a privacy advantage for our customers in accepting bitcoins directly that I'm not seeing make an argument for it and I'll see what we can do. I don't think there is any additional privacy advantage to the customer unless we spat out a different address for each customer. We might do that at a later date too. It may require custom coding on our part and then manually converting bitcoin to USD through an exchange.

Until today though we have only accepted bitcoins directly when customers have requested it. Bitpay makes the process of purchasing with bitcoins much easier in that the process is automated and users can simply check out like they normally would. While we can make the customer part automatic the advantage for us is the whole process it automated and we didn't have to implement custom code to do it. By that I mean when a user pays in bitcoins to our bitpay connected bitcoin address the coins are converted to USD and then wired to a bank account automatically. We do have the option of keeping bitcoins as bitcoins or a part thereof if we choose as well.

It may also be interesting to note that we have used bitcoins received from customers to pay for services/products.

>BitPay requires users to give their name, removing one incentive to use Bitcoin in the first place (the opportunity for privacy, although Bitcoin isn't private "by default").

>I understand that, like EFF, ThinkPenguin is probably concerned about financial regulations.

Yet that's no worse than any other payment processor.

I think adding Bitcoin to the mix was a good move.

You can send us Bitcoins directly although it would require manual processing of your order right now. We do have a Bitcoin address. This greatly simplifies it. Now when you checkout your presented the option to pay with Bitcoins and can confirm the payment has been received/accepted right away (or nearly right away). It is also less risky for us as we don't have to store the Bitcoins. That makes us less of a target for 'theft'. Bitcoins are also more resistant to fraud since there like cash. We don't have to worry about charge backs. The conversion fee is also less than that of merchant accounts (how you accept credit cards) or PayPal.

You make a good point. Maybe in the new version of our web site we'll post the titles of blog posts to the front page. Or something similar. I'm hoping to also add a check box at checkout to opt-in to a mailing list. It would probably amount to what ends up getting posted on the blog. As far as future promotion of Bitcoins the new site will (I'm hoping) have integration such that prices will be advertised in BTC too (might be a bit tricky to setup). That will be in addition to USD, Euros, Pounds, and other currencies.

I've delayed and delayed making any improvements to the current site. I don't want to waste time on something we are going to be replacing. Most of the work going on right now is the new site and just trying to keep up on maintenance of the items in the catalog or replacements for discontinued products. However I did setup the blog as I wanted to move forward with a press release on Bitcoins. There are actually other things we could be making some sort of announcement on.

We have a 3rd USB N wireless adapter now with the AR9280+AR7010 chipset. Like the others it is free software friendly and works with Trisquel 6 (if all updates are applied and the firmware is added/installed).

I'm trying to think what else. We are working on two new Haswell desktop systems and one new 3rd gen Penguin Wee system. Haswell's going to be expensive and the 3rd generation hardware appears like it is going to be around a while longer and will essentially be replacing the lower spec'd stuff Intel has released in the past. At least for a while. We have most of the hardware for the Haswell systems and can ship them although I am waiting on some internal components for wireless. There is a new piece we have never needed or at least used before. Not critical if your not going to get a wifi card with the system.