Now Accepting Bitcoin on Dell.com
Notice how all these big "wins" for bitcoin come in the form of services facilitated by a centralized 3rd party. Coinbase, Bitpay, et al are becoming the de facto gatekeepers of bitcoin in business, it's not hard to imagine a future where these companies are the only practical option for real people interacting with the bitcoin economy. We're building a centralized infrastructure around the supposed decentralized currency of the future and these companies have extremely cumbersome KYC procedures; paypal never required me to scan a passport, take a selfie or submit to social graph analysis in order to use their services.<p>edit:<p>As some have pointed out, KYC is for <i>buying</i> bitcoin, not for making purchases with bitcoin, this is a fair point, but I think it's still noteworthy to recognize that <i>most people</i> will endure that KYC process to acquire bitcoins since the alternative is something like localbitcoins (scam prone and considerable effort for a newbie). Additionally, it's still true that for most people, the practical utility of bitcoin is a function of the services that these 3rd party companies are willing/able to provide, if some of these big players went bankrupt, suffered from long term DDOS, encounter legal problems or have their coins stolen by hackers, suddenly your average consumer has lost practical use of their bitcoins.