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Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group has teamed up with Bitcoin merchant acquirer BitPay Inc. to retrofit a traditional POS terminal for Bitcoin acceptance in stores. And the U.S. Marshals Service is planning to auction off the last of the Bitcoin that the FBI seized in 2013 when it busted Ross Ulbricht, who is now serving a life sentence for his role as mastermind of the Silk Road online underground marketplace. Silk Road accepted only Bitcoin for purchases of drugs and other illegal goods.
Atlanta-based BitPay and France-based Ingenico, whose U.S. operations also are headquartered in Atlanta, claim their project is an industry first, and could help bring Bitcoin payments, most of which are online, to more brick-and-mortar merchants. They demonstrated it Tuesday at a Blockchain Week event in Barcelona, Spain. BitPay, which provides Bitcoin services to more than 60,000 merchants worldwide, developed the payment integration for installation on an Ingenico ICT250 terminal.
The merchant must download Bitcoin-accepting software through BitPay or a BitPay-affiliated independent sales organization, a BitPay spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. To process a Bitcoin payment, the merchant first enters the amount of the order in local currency. The terminal will then display a Quick Response (QR) code with the corresponding amount of Bitcoin that the customer will scan with his mobile phone to complete the purchase. The phone needs to be equipped with a Bitcoin wallet app, the spokesperson says. Such wallets hold the consumer’s Bitcoin account details, including how much in Bitcoin the consumer owns.
“This integration will help us expand Bitcoin payments to thousands of retail payment terminals worldwide,” BitPay executive chairman Tony Gallippi said in a news release. In that same release, Miguel Angel Hernandez, managing director of Ingenico Iberia, said, “At Ingenico our mission is to be at the forefront of any payment method and to provide secure transactions for both the merchant and the end customer.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Marshals Service has set Nov. 5 as the date for its fourth and final auction of the last remaining Bitcoin seized in the now famous San Francisco bust of Ulbricht, the self-proclaimed “Dread Pirate Roberts” who created Silk Road to buy and sell illegal goods anonymously using Bitcoin. The 44,341 Bitcoins for sale in the online auction will be sold in 22 blocks—21 containing 2,000 bitcoins and the other just over 2,341. Bids will be taken only from pre-registered persons, with registration beginning Oct. 19.
The entire lot would be worth $10.9 million based on Bitcoin’s price of $245.90 late Tuesday afternoon as posted on the CoinDesk news service.
The FBI seized nearly 174,000 Bitcoins in Ross’ personal possession or linked to Silk Road. In the first auction in June 2014, venture capitalist Timothy Draper bought the entire stock of nearly 30,000 Bitcoin up for sale. They were worth an estimated $17.4 million based on Bitcoin’s price of about $585 around the time of auction, but the Marshals Service has never said how much it has cleared from that or two subsequent auctions of Bitcoin linked to Silk Road.
Ulbricht was sentenced in May to life in prison after being found guilty of seven counts related to his creation and operation of Silk Road.
