Redditors are competing to prove their country is most Bitcoin friendly

Bitcoin enthusiasts on Reddit have come up with a new, ridiculous challenge: posting photos of stores accepting BTC payments from the most unexpected places in the world.

The trend seems to have started when an r/Bitcoin user posted a photo of a store accepting payments in BTC in Romania. The user called it “the first signs of Bitcoin going mainstream.”

Redditors from other country were not happy with the Romanian claim that Bitcoin acceptance is higher in their country. They decided to compete and started posting pictures of stores accepting BTC in their own countries.

This started a whole saga of ‘I see you, and raise you’ posts in a bid to show which country is the most progressive when it comes to accepting BTC payments.

Here are some of our favorite ones:

I see your Romania and give you Saigon, Vietnam!

I see your Vietnam and raise you Vienna, Austria!

I see your Saigon and raise you VangVieng Bitcoin club, Laos!

I see your VangVieng and raise you Bali, Indonesia!

I see your Bali Indonesia, and I raise you a hotdog, Canada!

I’ll see your Toronto, Canada and raise you Southern California, USA!

I see your Bitcoin stores, and I raise you this Kiosk, France!

I see all your cities and raise you a 150 year old Brewery, Canada.

If the number of photos are to go by, Canada seems to have the highest number of stores accepting BTC — or maybe Canadian Redditors are the most patriotic.

The competition might just help start a healthy discussion on the utility of Bitcoin in retail stores. While more than 100,000 merchants accept BTC worldwide, there have been deliberation over whether BTC is viable for day-to-day payments due to high transaction costs .

Do you have pictures of stores accepting BTC that are better than these? Raise the bar and let us know in the comments below.

‘Bitcoin’ was the 9th most read article on Wikipedia in 2017

Gone are the days when you had to personally break down the concept of Bitcoin to your less informed friends and family. Wikipedia has got them all up to speed now.

The 2017 edition of the annual ‘ Top 50 Report ’ of Wikipedia shows that Bitcoin was the ninth most-read article on the digital encyclopedia for last year.

Bitcoin’s article got a total of over 15 million views, less than a million short of the views for the entry on the US .

The list shows that Bitcoin got 1 million more views than Wonder Woman, 2.6 million more than Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and 2 million more than Elon Musk.

In a witty and poetic entry written by Wikipedia Senior Editor JFG , Bitcoin is described as something that is the highly speculative and intangible — but still would have been a better investment than Tesla stocks in 2017:

Other cryptocurrencies still seem to be trailing far behind when it comes to popularity among the general population. There’s no other cryptocurrency related article that could make it to the list of top 50.

But, even the 5000 most popular article in the last week feature only four articles from the cryptocurrency realm — Bitcoin ( 354 ), Blockchain ( 312 ), Cryptocurrency ( 1273 ), and Ethereum ( 3710 ).

The term blockchain is getting more search queries now than Bitcoin, which also shows that people are diving deeper into the world of cryptocurrencies and trying to understand the technology behind it.

So… Who says Bitcoin is struggling to break into mainstream culture?

H/T Jameson Lopp

A Scottish addiction facility wants to help ‘cryptocurrency addicts’

Are you one of those people whose eyes are fixed all day long at Coinmarketcap waiting for the right moment to buy or sell cryptocurrencies? Do you have a trading account on tens if not hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges? Do you scoff at people who don’t know what HODL, bull, bear, whale, ATH, FUD, and FOMO mean?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then — I hate to tell you, but — you might have a problem: cryptocurrency addiction. Even though I couldn’t find any mention of this particular addiction in scientific literature, Castle Craig Hospital, Scotland’s largest addiction treatment facility, now has a centre dedicated to cryptocurrency addicts, Sky News reports .

The professionals at the facility believe that cryptocurrency addicts show the same behavior as problem gamblers , i they show an urge to continually trade cryptocurrencies in spite of suffering constant losses.

“The high risk, fluctuating cryptocurrency market appeals to the problem gambler,” Chris Burn, a gambling therapist at Castle Craig Hospital, told Sky News. “It provides excitement and an escape from reality. Bitcoin, for example, has been heavily traded and huge gains and losses were made. It’s a classic bubble situation.”

As per the therapists, cryptocurrency addicts can be treated using the same techniques used with other gambling addicts — starting with group therapy where the addicts share their life experiences with each other.

Since the affliction doesn’t seem to be based on science, we decided to do our own research.

We asked a few cryptocurrency traders we know whether they thought they have a problem and would consider signing up for the rehabilitation program.

Niko da Costa Gomez is a frequent cryptocurrency trader but has so far been making profits on his investments. He won’t consider signing up for a rehabilitation program. “It’s not a very good idea,” he told us. “I don’t think anyone is really addicted to trading cryptocurrency unless they are very rich.”

Manav Singhal, CEO of a blockchain startup Velix.ID , keeps trading cryptocurrencies in spite of making continuous losses. He also refused to admit he had a problem, instead giving a rather philosophical answer:

“I think profits and losses are just a part of the trading, and it is no different than trading any other kinds of securities,” he said. “Gambling addicts are just that — gambling addicts. They can choose any addiction they want, and it can be cryptocurrencies, but that doesn’t mean that a majority of cryptocurrency traders are addicts. There’re many reasons that make you trade cryptocurrencies frequently, given how fast things are changing in the industry. I am not signing up for any rehabilitation any time soon.”

I asked five additional cryptocurrency traders; they all laughed off the notion without offering any insights.

The responses at least lead to one conclusion — no one wants to admit the problem in the first place.

Disclaimer: The author is associated with Velix.ID, and holds some investments in its VXD tokens.