Dish Network Corp. said subscribers will soon be able to pay their bills using bitcoin, the online virtual currency that’s drawn scrutiny from regulators. The satellite-TV company, which has more than 14 million customers, will begin accepting bitcoin payments in the third quarter, according to a statement today. Dish says it’s the largest company to accept bitcoin as well as the first pay-tv provider to do so.
We thought it could be interesting to someone out there to share how the orders placed at Adafruit using bitcoin was going. We launched mid November 2013 and the average amount of total bitcoin orders per day was about $1,572.14 USD, with an average order size of $231.20 USD. Peak orders was around 100/day using bitcoin, in the last 30 days it’s about 5 to 10 orders / day using bitcoin and average amount per order being $170.86 USD. Other online stores in the maker world started taking bitcoin too, if you have some coins to spend, head on over to EMSL (Evil Mad Scientist). The coolest part of this experiment for us was an Adafruit community member built a bitcoin miner and then used the coins they mined to buy Adafruit electronics with the mined coins. More bitcoin news here…. Oh, would we add bitcoin now if we didn’t have it, based on what we know now? Sure, the big spend-coin-rush is over, glad we added it when we did!
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
