It’s been over a year since I last write about my experiences with bit coins. I have not been able to explore the world of crypto currency as much as I would have liked but I have managed a few things.
Overall though, it’s been very interesting to see how Bitcoin is becoming more and more mainstream all the time. If you watch closely it seems super slow but if you take a step back, it’s pretty amazing how fast it’s been.
Hive
It’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of wallet software. My favorite right now is Hive. I run it on my Mac. When I want to pay for something with bitcoin I just click on a link, it opens Hive, with a confirmation screen. I click ‘OK’, put my password in and it’s done.
New Egg
NewEgg.com recently started accepting bitcoin. I needed to place a small electronics order and I figured I’d give their bitcoin payment method a try. The only hiccup was I initially had items in my cart that were supplied by one of their “partners” (or something like that) and the bitcoin option was not there. I changed out the items in my cart for similar ones that NewEgg supplied and it worked great.
Coin Base
Even though I’ve been spending bitcoins I have yet to replenish my supply. I’ve been meaning to do that and I figured I’d replace the the ones I spent at NewEgg. I’ve had a Coin Base account for a while but I never set it up to buy and sell bit coins. I went ahead and did that. It worked great. It reminded me a lot of setting up a PayPal account, but they seemed to have smoothed the process out even more. I actually had a verified account in less then an hour (and only about 5 minutes of filling in information). That included 2-factor authentication, verifying my checking account and a credit card. I won’t get my bitcoins for about 3 businesses. It will be interesting to see if that works faster in the future or if that’s just the speed at which banks work. It takes about the same amount of time (maybe a little longer) to get money into my PayPal account.
Over all I was impressed with how ‘pro’ everything from New Egg, to Hive to Coin Base feels. I see that Hive has a Coin Base app, it will be interesting to see what that does.
Speaking of which, if you are thinking about setting up a Coin Base account you should let me refer you.