Bitcoin Can Now Buy You Basketball And Beer

bitkingsGot a bitcoin or two burning a hole in your virtual, digital pocket? There’s now one more thing you can go spend them on: it’s time to go take in a basketball game. In California.

The Sacramento Kings franchise announced today that by March 1, bitcoin will be accepted as payment not only for game tickets, but also for team merchandise like jerseys and even for concessions in the arena.

Team owner Vivek Ranadivé told the Wall Street Journal, “The way I saw it, bitcoin had reached a tipping point where it had crossed from being a curiosity to a becoming a legitimate form of doing commerce.” He also told ESPN,”My kids would go to games and ask why we didn’t accept Bitcoin.”

Aside from the idea of bitcoin as every kid’s favorite brand-name money, the currency’s accepted legitimacy does indeed appear to be picking up speed. Basketball merch joins the small but growing list of lawful real-world items customers can spend their hard-invested bitcoins on, along with cocktails, Teslas, and goods from Overstock.com.

As founder and CEO of a software firm, it’s not that surprising that Ranadivé wants to embrace the digital future. Sacramento is a pretty good place to pilot bitcoin acceptance in, as the WSJ also notes.: the city isn’t terribly far from the tech hotbed of the San Francisco bay area, and is itself home to a number of tech businesses. That kind of highly-wired town is a good place to test out a digital currency.

Today, one bitcoin is worth about $825. Maybe it will be a relief to someone to take a family of four to an NBA game for less than 0.50 of something.

Sacramento Kings to Accept Bitcoin [Wall Street Journal]

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