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Andy Watson
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eBay added virtual currency section to its website in the U.S.
The world’s known service eBay has recently added a ‘virtual currency’ section on their main site, thus allowing buyers to purchase and sell digital currencies like bitcoin, as well as mining contracts and mining equipment.
The e-commerce had previously included this section in the category changes list for April under “Coins and Paper Money’.
However, nobody knows whether the company has finally accepted the use of digital currencies as payment so far. Currently eBay is the full-right owner of widely used throughout the world payment processing firm, Paypal, which has continued to compete against its rivals like bitcoin.
eBay had previously admitted that bitcoins currency is a “potential competitor’ for PayPal. While PayPal has charged a 2-3% fee for processing transactions, Bitcoin requires much less fees, as this type of currency can be transferred without the necessary need of going through banks or clearing houses.
The change was first noticed by Coindesk, and it brings the U.S. site into line with eBay in the UK, which has had a virtual currency category for two months already.
“You can’t use Bitcoin or Dogecoin to pay for your goods yet, but it’s a step in that direction,” explains Digital Trends. “As with the UK site, buying and selling virtual currencies must be done via a classified ad rather than the tradition auction or Buy It Now formats — that means the buyer and seller need to sort out the payment details between themselves.”
So, now eBay divided its virtual currency section for the U.S. region into three categories: mining contracts, currency and miners.
The first one is supposed to be used by sellers to promise “a fixed hash rate for working mining equipment for buy for a set of specific time at a price”. The miners and mining contract subdivisions also feature some digital currency sales listed on the Auction and ‘Buy it Now’ option price.
“Reports have also shown that eBay is in the process of creating a digital wallet for multiple purposes for currency, complementing Paypal, to avoid threat from the every increasing popularity of virtual currencies. During an interview with Bloomberg, John Donaho, CEO of eBay had commented that digital currencies can be integrated into PayPal and are not posing any serious threat to their business,” reports Enterpreneur Sky.
“There is nothing holding PayPal back from pursuing digital payments today, as part of eBay. In fact PayPal is pursuing digital payments and is the leading digital payments alternative in many different environments,” Donahoe said.
“You can use digital currencies in the PayPal digital wallet, that’s in fact what PayPal is doing – is building a digital wallet that can take multiple types of currency.”
