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If you’re involved in Bitcoin, you have no doubt been asked the question “So, who accepts bitcoin?” True, it is the quintessential chicken and egg paradox, but that is not unexpected for the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency lacking a political authority.
Commodity money and quasi-commodity money must gain legitimacy and acceptance through the rigors of the free market unlike political currencies that simply gain prominence by virtue of State sanctioning. In the true absence of State sanctioning or legal tender status, the monetary unit with the superior features will prevail in a competitive marketplace.
Let’s take a look at the top ten merchant sites on the Internet that are currently accepting bitcoin as payment. Uncensored rankings are based on the amount of three-month traffic received by the website according to Alexa Top Sites (as of May 24th, 2013). The updated list is provided courtesy of The Bitcoin Trader, but a separate version of the Bitcoin Ladder is also tracked on the Bitcoin wiki.
1. WordPress.com (Alexa Global Ranking 22) – Site offers free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software and includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, and automatic spam protection. WordPress announced their decision to start accepting bitcoin in November 2012.
2. The Pirate Bay (Alexa Global Ranking 108) – As a large BitTorrent directory for music, movies and software, The Pirate Bay started accepting bitcoin for donations in April 2013.
3. Reddit (Alexa Global Ranking 117) – The social news and entertainment site focuses on user-generated news links with votes promoting top stories to the front page. Reddit started acceptingbitcoin for the purchase of reddit gold in February 2013.
4. The Internet Archive (Alexa Global Ranking 245) – The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization established to provide a permanent digital library by preserving Web sites. The Wayback Machine provides links to older versions of various webpages. They started accepting bitcoin donations and paying some employees in bitcoin in February 2013.
5. OkCupid (Alexa Global Ranking 687) – The free friendship, dating and social networking site startedaccepting bitcoin to pay for bonus features in April 2013.
6. 4chan.org (Alexa Global Ranking 882) - 4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images without a requirement to register. The boards are dedicated to a variety of topics, from Japanese animation and culture to video games, music, and photography. They started acceptingbitcoin for premium subscriptions in December 2012.
7. Namecheap (Alexa Global Ranking 974) -Namecheap offers affordable domain name registration, parking, e-mail, URL forwarding, and SSL certificates. They began accepting bitcoin in March 2013.
8. EZTV (Alexa Global Ranking 1,052) – EZTV.it is your one-stop source for all your favorite TV shows and they started accepting bitcoin donations in April 2013.
9. Mega.co.nz (Alexa Global Ranking 1,783) – MEGA offers 50 GB of free storage space and uploaded files are encrypted with only the user holding the decryption keys. Processed by Bitvoucher, the Kim Dotcom site startedaccepting bitcoin for private package upgrades in February 2013.
10. Lumfile (Alexa Global Ranking 3,761) – Lumfile is a free cloud-based file server that has been accepting bitcoin for premium accounts since at least December 2012.
Other notable sites in the ranking include LewRockell.com (9,202), OKPay (11,704), and the Tor Project (14,028). Of course, top merchant sites by bitcoin volume would produce an entirely different list, but that data is not always publicly available. Additional bitcoin merchants from a wide variety of categories can be found on the Bitcoin Trade wiki.
