Less than 30 minutes after online retailer Overstock.com started accepting payments in bitcoin, Jason Steele used the digital currency to buy a new case for his smartphone.
Steele — a 32-year-old computer programmer from Atlanta who has been using bitcoin since March of last year — wanted to see if Overstock's new system actually worked, but he was also interested in, well, fighting the good fight. Overstock is the first major online retailer to accept the digital currency, and Steele was doing his part to help push this new-age technology even further into the mainstream, so that it becomes a viable alternative to fiat currencies like the dollar and the euro and the yen.
"It's a concept that could take off, and should take off, for a lot of reasons," he says. "I want wider adoption. I want more businesses to use it."
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