St. Pete businesses embrace bitcoin despite troubles, BitPay banks on bowl exposure - Tampa Bay Business Journal
Dec 11, 2014, 2:26pm EST Updated: Dec 12, 2014, 2:57pm EST
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Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg
More than 100 St. Petersburg businesses will accept bitcoin as payment by the time the Bitcoin St. Petersburg college football bowl game takes place later this month.
Representatives from BitPay Inc., the lead bowl sponsor, have worked since June to explain to business owners the benefits of the controversial digital currency, according to a BitPay statement released Thursday.
Benefits include no transaction fees and chargebacks, which are what credit card providers charge retailers to make good on bad transactions, according to the statement.
The following businesses were named bitcoin acceptors. Global bitcoin business directories Coinmap and AirBitz will list the businesses by bowl game week.
- Green Bench Brewing
- Craftsman House and Gallery
- St. Petersburg Museum of History
- The Ale and the Witch
- Acropolis Greek Taverna
- Genaro Coffee Company
- Hotel Zamora
- Ferg's Sports Bar
BitPay, based in Atlanta, processes bitcoin payments and has raised more than $32 million from the likes of Index Ventures, Founders Fund and Richard Branson of Virgin.
The biggest challenge has been walking businesses through the process of getting bitcoins, Wargo said.
"The best case scenario is we get 15,000 to 20,000 who attended fitted with wallets and do a transaction that day," Wargo said. "That's my ideal world."
While Wargo believes recent publicized hackings at major retailers and financial institutions will help boost the idea bitcoin is just as safe as traditional payments, bitcoin has its own history of trouble, said economics professor Mark D. Soskin, who teaches at University of Central Florida. UCF will play North Carolina State at the bowl game.
The bowl game will get BitPay small but easy exposure, Soskin said. He will watch the ratings, attendance numbers and BitPay's marketing strategies to see if the company will fare well in the race to commercialize bitcoin first.
Like Facebook for social networks and Kodak for film, the first major presence in a new industry gets to make the rules and set barriers for companies following suit, Soskin said.
"To be too early or too late is the worst," he said. "Timing is everything. They must wait for the critical economic complements."
Wade Tyler Millward is a reporter for the Tampa Bay Business Journal.