In this article, we’ve compiled a list of 17 companies that accept bitcoin, all of which are major, publicly traded companies. While bitcoin’s adoption among prominent companies is still relatively slow, it’s slowly but surely gaining wider acceptance. It’s estimated that as many as 260,000 stores in Japan will be accepting bitcoin by this summer, while over 10,000 ATMs in the EU now dispense bitcoins. Heck, you can even buy pot in Seattle using the currency, which was approved by the State of Washington.
The rise in bitcoin’s value is truly staggering. In just eight years, a $27 investment in the cryptocurrency was worth $886,000, as a Norwegian man recently discovered after buying 5,000 bitcoins in 2009 and promptly forgetting about them for several years. From being worth mere pennies in 2009, one bitcoin is now worth over $1,500, with the price having skyrocketed by over 50% in 2017 alone.
However, the currency’s extreme volatility has generally scared away serious investors, as have concerns that some governments could try to crack down on its usage. There have also been multiple cases of bitcoin theft that have raised doubts about just how safe it is to have a stash of bitcoins stored online. The most infamous case involved the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Tokyo, Japan, which was allegedly robbed of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins beginning in 2011, which today would be worth over $1 billion.
Fake bitcoin wallet apps that rob users of their bitcoins are also on the rise, which even Apple, with its stringent app approval process, has had difficulty in managing at times. It was reported last year that more than 10 such apps had made it through Apple’s vetting process before later being deleted, one of which possibly stole as much as $20,000 from victims.
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However, aside from investing in bitcoins, there are other ways to make some money from them and other cryptocurrencies, as we examined in our article on the 6 Easiest Coins To Mine: Cryptocurrency Mining on A Normal Computer.
For our list, we have only considered companies that accept bitcoin in a direct manner (or have some form of bitcoin platform so that others can accept bitcoin), even if that manner is through a bitcoin middleman, which is the case with several companies on this list. However, we have not listed companies which require gift cards to be bought through third-party sites with bitcoins, as it can’t really be claimed that the company itself is accepting bitcoins. That ruled out companies like Home Depot and CVS from making this list.
Now then, head to the next page for the first of 17 companies that accept bitcoin.
