BTC Weekly: 02/26/15

Welcome back to another installment of BTC Weekly. I apologize for missing last weeks article. I was on vacation shredding deep powder in Colorado and didn’t have a chance to get an article up! So, this weeks will cover quite a bit of information!

Googles I/O conference is scheduled for May of this year. It was leaked that Google will be announcing a new payment API called “Android Pay”. This will be the competition against Apple’s “Apple Pay”. This will help power both in-store payments as well as third party “in-app” purchases. They are hoping that this will help other brick and mortar stores to accept “tap to pay” transactions through NFC chips. It isn’t clear yet if Google has any partnering companies to label as their guinea pig so it’s assumed that Google wallet will operate entirely as a separate entity to Android Pay.

I wasn’t aware of what Provident Metals really was (even though I had heard the name before). Provident is an online company that excels in the sales of precious metals both bars and coins. They have been accepting cryptocurrencies as forms of payment for precious metals for the past 8 months. This alone is not new news. The thing that was found though… If you pay with a form of digital currency they give you an extra discount on your purchase.

We provide a 4% cash discount off of our list/retail prices when you pay by check, money order, cashier’s check, or bank wire. We offer a 3% crypto discount when you pay with Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Dogecoin. The prices listed for each product on the website include the 4% cash discount unless you choose to pay by credit card or Paypal.

Sure it’s not an insane discount. But when you’d expect a 1:1 swap essentially. Awesome.

March 13-17 is this years SXSW festival. Bitcoin will be taking the center stage this year by hosting a full day worth of Bitcoin related content.

Sessions you can expect to see:

What is Bitcoin

Bitcoin 2.0

A Future with Bitcoin

Impact on Developing World

Real World Applications

The final bit of news this week comes from Bitstamp (also known as “Stamp” in the Bitcoin community). Bitstamp announced today that it has introduced simpler fees for their trading platform. This was done to reduce costs for the majority of their clients which base is less than $1000 monthly trading volume. By doing so, it allows people who are trying to dabble into the Bitcoin Stock based trading game to get their feet wet while also not breaking the bank by watching the majority of their BTC diminish as they make trades. The fee chart is as follows.