Microsoft quietly announced that it will now accept bitcoins for purchases of digital content on its Windows and Xbox online market places. This means you can now buy bitcoin and use it to purchase, apps, games, music and movies, but only for US customers. This move is a huge win for both bitcoin and Microsoft as both will reap financial and PR benefits.
The financial benefit of a company deciding to accept bitcoin is you remove the 2-6% credit card transaction fees tied to each purchase. With bitcoin money is sent peer to peer digitally. There is no credit card middle man skimming off the top of your profits. Microsoft has chosen not to handle the bitcoin transactions themselves and let a third party, BitPay, do this but these fees are far less than that of the major credit card companies. Even though this will increase Microsoft’s profit margin slightly as users begin to make purchases via bitcoin, I believe the real purpose of Microsoft’s decision is to try and capture the large market of crypto currency enthusiasts.
Bitcoin is just one of the hundreds of crypto currencies on the internet, but it is the largest and most widely known of all the digital currencies. Many people have commenced investing in bitcoin but are unaware of the taxes on cryptocurrency gains that must be paid. Crypto currency enthusiasts are a large sub culture of the tech community who want to see the mainstream adoption of crypto currencies. Bitcoin has had other large corporations decide to accept it like Overtstock.com, DirecTV, Expedia, and Newegg. These are all big companies but to have Microsoft, the 2nd largest company in the world, it should bring a lot of attention to bitcoin and help it achieve mainstream adoption.
For Microsoft I believe the decision to accept bitcoins was largely based on trying to improve the company’s image with the millions of crypto currency enthusiasts. Any crypto currency enthusiast who maybe harbored a negative image of Microsoft might be having a change of heart, and with the ability to now access sites like https://bitcoins-profit.com/, it is more likely that all of this will help strengthen the value of the bitcoin. The bitcoin community loves to support companies that accept the currency, so this could be a way of Microsoft capturing good PR from a large community of tech consumers.
