10 Jan 2014 / Forbes – Last month, Overstock.com, which sells everything from jewelry to couches, announced that it would start accepting Bitcoin by the middle of 2014. CEO Patrick Byrne, 51, said the low-priced site was looking forward to cutting down on transaction fees for purchases given that its net margin is just 2%. The site took the Internet by surprise Thursday by moving its Bitcoin deadline up radically: it’s accepting Bitcoin as of today.
“Our first purchase with Bitcoin was a $2700 patio set,” says Byrne from Salt Lake City, where the company is based. In the first 90 minutes of Bitcoin sales, the site had received about 150 orders. Byrne says the company’s rough estimate is that 1% of its sales in 2014, or approximately $13 million, will come in the form of Bitcoin. “It’s a wild guess,” he says.
Byrne, who launched Overstock in 1999 to sell surplus and returned merchandise, has been following Bitcoin for over a year. As a dogged libertarian who fell in love with computation theory while studying philosophy at Stanford, Bitcoin “was like my dream come true.” He was initially worried about Bitcoin being in a legal grey zone, but was reassured by the Senate hearings in November….. Read more
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/09/overstock-bitcoin/
