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Bitcoin Had Its Own Black Friday

On November 9th, 65 Bitcoin-accepting merchants all got together, tossed their logos onto a website, and offered discount rates on products as diverse as bars of gold, chocolates, and automobiles.

On November 9th, 65 Bitcoin-accepting merchants all got together, tossed their logos onto a website, and offered discount rates on products as diverse as bars of gold, chocolates, and automobiles. The idea was to stage a Bitcoin-only Black Friday-esque event to capitalize on the holiday purchasing frenzy, and maybe raise the profile of the oft-derided, always interest-piquing online currency in the process. Thus Bitcoin Friday was born.

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The deals were formidable: Wikispeed, which manufactures cars that “are designed and built by teams of collaborative volunteer teams distributed around the world,” offered $5,000 off the $25K sticker price. Other discounts included your standard 15% off, waived shipping and processing fees, and so on.

So how’d it go? PaymentSource says the results were a mixed bag:

BeesBros, a North Logan, Utah-based bee-keeping honey-making family business, accepted 30 Bitcoin transactions during its Bitcoin Friday sale. Prior to the sale, the business handled one to two Bitcoin orders per week, says Craig Huntzinger, a co-owner with his wife and kids … Stomp Romp, a guitar store in Manchester, N.H., also participated in Bitcoin Friday but received only one order during the event. Joshua Harvey, the store’s owner, says he didn’t expect to sell much on Friday because he runs a new store selling to a niche market that doesn’t overlap with the Bitcoin enthusiast crowd. “That said, we consider Bitcoin Friday a big success,” Harvey says. “Our online traffic doubled on Friday and this was wholly due to the event.”

Coding in My Sleep reports that the top Bitcoin payment facilitator WalletBit deemed the event a success: “Bitcoin Friday was a busy and successful day for BitPay and our merchants. BitPay processed a record number of 99 orders from midnight ET Friday to midnight ET Saturday, breaking our previous single-day record of 95 orders. Merchants like Bees Brothers, Private Internet Access, Bitcoin Coffee, and AllThingsLuxury saw good order volume all day long.”

Clearly, this was a modest event. The sales of a single Walmart in Maine during the first twenty minutes of Black Friday will probably eclipse all of Bitcoin Friday’s combined. But that’s not the point.

The point is that all of the Bitcoin-friendly merchants—carmakers, guitar shops, candy sellers, etc, are beginning to drive the currency further into mainstream. And they’re doing so by appropriating the most visible, most predominant shopping traditions in the world. No drugs or poker chips were sold on Bitcoin Friday. No cars were, either, true. But there are signs the tides are turning towards Bitcoin’s favor; Reddit and Wordpress just started accepting the currency, after all.

Nonetheless, Bitcoin’s promoters are going to have to get a little savvier about introducing their platform to a wider community of online traders (ie, beyond illegal markets) if they hope to make true inroads into the global marketplace for non-drug, non-gambling-related items. Bitcoin Friday marks an interesting, if relatively inauspicious effort to do so.