SparkFun Electronics Forum

I think Bitcoin would be the best way for international payment (no fees for change etc).

I wouldn't hold your breath on that one. There are way too many risks involved with Bitcoin to make it worth while. It doesn't help that lots of black market contributions are done through the Bitcoin system which will inevitably be investigated by governments the world around.

Since the currency is so small compared to say the US dollar or the Euro, its value can fluctuate wildly which would put a lot of risk on Sparkfun. I don't think they would recode their site to constantly monitor the value of a bitcoin and adjust their prices automatically.

Stick with your credit cards for the time being. They quite often have the best exchange rates and many of them don't charge extra for foreign transactions.

-Bill

With bit pay it's easy to accept bitcoin and immediately convert to cash, I promise to buy like jumpers and other little random junk I need if you guys do it (that's gotta be like 25 cents of profit, think of all the gum you could buy!)

I don't think Sparkfun should use Bitcoin. I will never use it and pretty sure there are others that will not either. I have a feeling that Bitcoin will crash soon.

That's quite the old thread to see revived, but awright2009 is right.. there are payment processors that accept Bitcoin and pay out plain ol' dollars (or euros or yen as the case may be) and make it relatively easy to price items in Bitcoin depending on current rates; note that SparkFun already does much the same when you choose pricing in values other than USD. I'm sure Adafruit could offer some pointers there, as they have been accepting Bitcoin for several months now.
Of course whether SparkFun wants to be 'associated with' Bitcoin in any way is another matter. While some would applaud the move, others might be wondering why they would get 'involved with' a currency that has been in the news primarily in a negative way ( discussion of whether that's justified or not probably belongs in one of umpteenhundred existing Reddit threads )

Without getting into the ideological implications of cryptocurrency, we're not opposed to accepting Bitcoin at this point in history. As mentioned, there're payment gateways that make it relatively painless.

At this stage it's really only a question of whether our supply of round tuits will spike while Bitcoin is still a going concern. I honestly don't know. Personally, I'd be happy to offer it, but there's also a list of projects about a mile long that I care about more, and I expect that goes for most of us.

As an update, we may have found some tuits. Please stay tuned.

Give me an address and I'll donate some extra tuits. They are elliptical, not round, but hopefully they will help.

Brennen@SparkFun wrote:As an update, we may have found some tuits. Please stay tuned.

Here we are in 2017... Bitcoin is still here (and currently hovering around US$1800/BTC), and I've got some bitcoin burning a virtual hole in my virtual wallet.

You can always do what SF would have to do... convert it to dollars and spend it that way.

The volatility hasn't changed much since then. So I doubt SF would dare it. Remember they are a business with families to feed.