Buying wine with bitcoin?

Serious question. Is anyone here buying wine with bitcoin?

I am working on a big currency overhaul for CellarTracker and debating whether to add this as a supported currency.

Jay Hack?

https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=82246

Currency overhaul meaning allowing people to pay for the annual ‘suggested’ service with bitcoin, or adding purchasing options (freakin’ cool, if so) on the site, including bitcoin/crypto currency as payment through CT?

Hi Eric,
I am a huge CT fan, a technology investor, and have dabbled in bitcoin. But, at least for now, I would not consider using bitcoin for wine purchases–it is just to volatile to be a good store-of-value, which makes any purchases difficult.
I will be curious to know if any others (perhaps for international purchases?) have started using it.
Thanks for staying on the cutting edge!

None of the above, although we did accept bitcoin payment by request for a while (until our payment provider decided to drop support).

Today the site lets you specify a locale that handles the default date and currency formatting: https://www.cellartracker.com/displayoptions.asp

When we launch these new features, we will do a number of things:

  • Decouple your default currency from your date and number formatting.
  • When adding a purchase to your cellar, allow you to track a specific currency. So for example, the vast bulk of my purchases are in US dollars, but over the years I have purchased plenty of wine in Euros, Swiss Francs, New Israeli Shekels and Canadian dollars. The system will allow me to track the native purchase price and currency.
  • Some views (e.g. individual bottles and your list of purchases) will show the native currency as well as the value converted to your default currency (in current exchange rates). Where we aggregate (e.g. the default cellar view shows your average purchase price) we will use the converted value to generate you personal aggregate.
  • Today the community average prices are only drawn from people using US dollars, but we are losing a lot of community data. Going forward, we will calculate the community price across all users.
  • And biggest of all for paying users outside of the US, they will soon get automatic cellar valuation based on auction and community data, just like US users. And in their default currency. Please see: Automatic Cellar Valuation - CellarTracker Support

So all of that to say, I am debating whether to add Bitcoin in the list of currencies that can be tracked. (It is a fun one, since it pushes the precision limits on the exchange rate math for some of the more undervalued currencies in the world. For example, 1 VEF is 0.000000001 BTC. So for those Venezuelan users buying wine in bitcoin, the exchange rate math is going to be a bit chunky.)

bitcoin the coin itself or cryto currency in general?
No for me in both cases

Specifically people using XBT/BTC to buy real, physical wine. https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=XBT&To=USD

So far I am not sensing a lot of demand here…

Perhaps the wine aficionados in North Korea might be interested? [wink.gif]

*Went to buy a bottle of RC advertised at 2 BTC, by the time I got to the end of the transaction, the price had changed to 4 BTC…

(*may not be a true story).

I dabbled in mining 6-7 years ago, its only really seemed to attract speculators since. You’re a few years early for this, IMO.

LOL.

I encourage you to do it. I’d love to buy wine using my Litecoin.

This is a great answer, IMHO - would be so difficult to place a true ‘value’ on your purchases using a ‘currency’ that is so CRAZY in flux all the time.

Here is a retailer who takes bitcoin: https://dewinespot.co/collections/fruity-red/products/il-paradiso-di-frassina-brunello-d-imontalcino-docg-mozartwine

And many more: Buy ‘wine’ with Bitcoin Crypto-Currency – Spendabit

You guys are missing the point of my question. Some people are buying wines with Bitcoin. They might want to track that. It is at some level just another currency albeit a weird one.

If the retailers are mainly selling in a local currency, but accepting bitcoin (likely converted instantaneously to the local currency) it seems more sensible to use the local currency value that is undoubtedly known to the CT user. Don’t see the benefit to listing the bitcoin value given that it’s so volatile and not really a freely convertible currency.

-Al

Eric, hard for me to find any usefulness in selling wines with such a volatile currency. If I was a business, I would try to minimize my exposure to risk, and that is using dollars, not bit coins. Why do you think there are Bordeaux futures, to minimize the risk.

Imagine you offer valuations of wine collections in bitcoins and the bitcoins collapses, does the value of that wine collectio really go down. I doubt it. But what if the bitcoin goes up? Will you be able to sell your collection at the much higher exchange rate? I seriously doubt it. In other words you would be offering an additional service with no practical benefit to your customer.

Think of the oil market. The US is fortunate that oil prices are in dollars and not euros. We are only exposed to oil price fluctuations, but no exchange rate fluctuations.

If anybody is actually buying wine with bitcoin I’m sure they know the conversion rate into their own currency, or at least know where to find it. I’m not sure why you would feel the need to program this into CT. If you want to do it because it’s “cool” and cutting edge then Ok, but I’m doubting anybody exclusively buys wine with bitcoin. Therefore why would they choose this over their normal local currency?

If you tell them their cellar is worth 6.376948 bitcoins today they are most certainly going to have to use a converter to see what that equals in local currency today or even this hour. It’s really creating an extra step for people, at least until bitcoin stabilizes (if ever). When you think I own bitcoin the first question in anybody’s mind is how much is it worth (in hard currency)

I highly doubt any retailer who accepts BTC will not have a program in place to immediately convert it to fiat. Therefore, eliminating the volatility.

I think it’s also worth considering that the majority of people dealing in bitcoin regularly are doing so to launder money. They aren’t the sort of people that are going to be recording their wine collection in an online database.

However, I still fall into the camp that it should be included. Every act of “normalisation” for cryptocurrency strengthens the argument for it, and it’ll take apps like CT making the jump for it to become commonplace, and eventually stabilize the value. I for one believe in the positive impact it could have on society. Blockchain tech could do wonders for tracing provenance too, if someone puts the effort in to implement an easy to use system.

I think you should do it, Eric, and good on you for considering it.

That’s a very fair and logical point. (And you are always fair and logical.)

I am not trying to make any social statement. Rather, as I am contemplating feeds of exchange rates, BTC is in there. And when we release our upgrade, we will have the ability to support currencies regardless of your system locale and currency formatting. That said, others make the point that anyone purchasing in Bitcoin likely knows the exchange rate to another currency at that moment, and that is a much more “stable” value to determine what you “spent” on wine, especially given that we currently plan to only use the CURRENT exchange rate to aggregate.

I am leaning to not including it at the outset.

On another note, sigh, we gave in and added Blue and Blue - Sparkling to the list of wine types. Argh. (Still working on adding new icons.)

Unlike Orange wines, these are not just white wines.