An online wine retailer has announced that it will accept bitcoin as a payment method for customers.
Entrepreneur and former IT manager Tala Drzewiecki originally founded the San Francisco Bay-run website Winelandia as a wine and food blog. In February 2014, she started selling natural wine on the site. By becoming an early adopter of digital currency – a new and increasingly popular form of currency – she hopes to find a market among tech-savvy wine lovers.
Created in 2009, Bitcoin is a digital currency. It acts as a form of online payment, like a credit card, but it provides users with anonymity, which has sparked concerns that it will be used to trade illegal goods. Other digital currencies including Litecoin, Peercoin and Dogecoin have since been created.
Winelandia is not the first California-based wine company to experiment with digital currency. The Picnic Wine Company of Napa also accepts bitcoin as payment, and the Paso Robles winery Mondo Cellars announced last November that it would exchange 30 percent of its company shares for bitcoin.
One bitcoin is currently worth around $600, although this has varied considerably since 2009 from just a few cents to a peak of around $900. Drzewiecki accepts the risks associated with the volatility of the currency.
“If I lose $100 through a transaction from someone purchasing wines, that’s a calculated risk I’m willing to take. Because it’s important that people are supporting these new technologies in their early stages.”
Drzewiecki, a fan of the user-generated news site Reddit, initially intended to accept Dogecoin on the website, hoping that the novelty of this currency – based on the Doge meme – would bring attention: “I wanted to accept Dogecoin because when things get traction on Reddit they explode, it’s a great way to reach people.”
However, Bitcoin’s longer history and higher rate of adoption meant it was an easier initial option although she hopes to accept Dogecoin in the future.
