The number of things you can buy with bitcoin keeps growing on a daily basis. The latest example we caught involves a New York preschool which decided to accept bitcoin payments to appease to a few parents who asked for such an option, as well as to get some ever-needed media attention.
In an interview to Business Insider, Marco Ciocca — the Chairman of The Montessori Schools in Flatiron and SoHo — explained that a few parents enquired about the option to pay the tuition fees with the cryptocurrency, and after thinking it through — they decided to introduce that capability.
To be fair, the school won’t keep those bitcoins and will rather transfer them to good ol’ dollars upon transaction, but still — it is nice to see bitcoin use cases growing with the day.
For what it matters, the payment processor enabling this capability charges the school a fee of 1 percent, which is still lower than typical credit card processing fee of 2-3 percent. And let’s not forget that credit cards can be declined and, as a result, incur additional fees.
So from the school’s point of view, they were just offering an additional and convenient payment option to the parents. At the same time, they got some free press from Wallet Weekly and a few other outlets around the web. Not a bad deal. 😉
The number of places accepting bitcoins keeps growing
Adding a bitcoin payment option is what many businesses are doing these days. Not only it gets them free publicity, but also new customers who may not be able to spend their cryptocurrency otherwise.
Arguably, the leader in this space is Overstock, which lets customers pay for goods with 40 different cryptocurrencies. Also on this list are such companies as PayPal, Microsoft, Dell, and Newegg.
According to Wikipedia’s data from 2015, the number of merchants accepting bitcoin exceeded 100,000. These days, we guess that number is closer to 200,000…