07 Dec 2013 / Bloomberg – Bitcoin, the virtual money former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “a bubble,” was accepted as payment in the purchase of a Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) Model S electric car at a California Lamborghini dealership.
Lamborghini Newport Beach sold the car for about $103,000, or 91.4 Bitcoins, in a transaction handled by payment processor BitPay, said Cedric Davy, marketing director for the Costa Mesa, California-based dealership. The sale cleared yesterday and the Model S will be delivered to its Florida-based buyer, who asked not to be identified, Davy said by telephone.
“We’re a dealership — we’re not in the business of doing any speculation,” he said. “For us, it was just important that the money could be transferred into U.S. dollars.”
While Bitcoin has been embraced by some as a way to pay for goods using smartphone applications, the money has had a harder time winning acceptance from governments and banks. This week China’s central bank barred financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions. Baidu Inc. (BIDU), the owner of that nation’s largest Internet search engine, yesterday halted acceptance of payments using Bitcoins for its website-acceleration service…… Read more
