Top 10 Bitcoin Merchant Sites

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Friday, May 24, 2013

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/24/top-10-bitcoin-merchant-sites/

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 accepting bitcoin 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 started accepting 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 accepting bitcoin 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 started accepting 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. AT THE INTERSECTION OF FREE BANKING, CRYPTOGRAPHY, AND DIGITAL CURRENCY