This Subway Franchise Owner Accepts Bitcoins

Sapan Shah, a 24-year-old graduate student at Lehigh University, has created a tourist attraction of sorts for bitcoin enthusiasts.
Since he began accepting the digital currency at his Allentown, Pa., Subway franchise two weeks ago, bitcoin fans have been coming from out of state to visit his sandwich shop, Shah told CNBC on Tuesday.
"Right now a lot of enthusiasts are coming in," he said on "Squawk on the Street.""Bitcoin enthusiasts are coming to show a lot of support for this. A lot of kids are coming two or three hours to drive. We're getting a lot of students from local areas who have studied bitcoin and understand it."Read more:
Subway did not endorse his decision to accept bitcoins, said Shah, who uses a tablet application to convert payments to U.S. dollars.
"This was just my idea, and [Subway] encourages operators to have innovative ideas," he added.
Asked whether bitcoin represented a bubble since gaining more public exposure in recent weeks, Shah agreed that prices could be inflated. According to exchange mtgox.com, a bitcoin was worth $730 as of noon Tuesday after reaching a record high of $900 on Monday.
"My hope is that as it continues to grow and the volume increases, the volatility will decrease a little bit," he said. "It hasn't been a problem with our customers."
U.S. lawmakers are mulling how to regulate the currency. Many are concerned that it could be used to cover illicit activity online, such as the infamous Silk Road, a website that federal authorities shut down after learning it accepted bitcoins to pay for illegal narcotics.
The currency has also gained traction among notable investors, including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

How One Startup Plans to Replace Every Card in Your Wallet

Entrepreneur Kanish Parashar has an ambitious goal: He wants to replace every credit card, gift card and loyalty card in your wallet. To do that, Parashar has founded a company called Coin. Unlike other companies like Square and PayPal that are trying to do the same thing with mobile apps and proprietary services, Parashar plans to use something quite different -- something that looks like a credit card. Coin is a Bluetooth card that can be used in the place of the cards in your wallet. Any card with a magnetic strip can be added to Coin, and a button on the front allows you to easily swap between cards. With each button press, the magnetic strip on the card essentially becomes your card of choice, giving you the ability to carry around your whole wallet in just a single piece of plastic. A tiny LED screen displays the last four digits of the card you're using along with its expiration date. The final version on Coin will also allow you to give each card a four-character nickname such as "Bank" or "Work" to keep them straight. Parashar got the idea for Coin after another payment startup of his, Smartmarket, failed. Smartmarket was a mobile payment solution that used "geofencing" to allow customers to pay for goods when they were physically near a store. While Smartmarket got quite a few downloads, it wasn't actually being used for payments. "Turns out we had a chicken and the egg problem," says Parashar. "Customers couldn't find merchants who adopted it, and merchants didn't see customers use the app, so they didn't have a reason to adopt it." With Coin, Parashar hopes the process will be intuitive. "A card is something that we're used to using," he says. "We have a habit [of using a card], and we trust it." Cards are added to Coin using a mobile card reader that plugs into your phone's headphone jack. Once you create an account for the service, Coin verifies that each card you add belongs to you and creates a mobile version of the card within the app. You can carry around literally hundreds of cards at a time in the app, and eight cards can be added to the physical card at any given time. A digital leash on Coin helps keep it safe. If you and your card are separated an alert will show on your phone letting you know you might have left Coin behind. After you're separated for a while -- you can select a time between just a few minutes or several hours -- the card is locked down, preventing any further use until you're reunited. The battery in Coin should last two years, and the card isn't susceptible to issues like scratching and demagnetization that plague traditional credit cards. Coin is launching a crowdfunding campaign today to begin production of the card. Initial backers can purchase the card for $50, a 50 percent discount on its future retail price of $100. Coin is expected to ship in the summer of 2014.

PayPal Goes Galactic, Moves to Cash In on Space Payments

Though the idea may sound out of this world, the nascent space tourism industry is set to take off in the next decade, and humans will need a way to pay for things in space as well as send payments to Earth, said PayPal President David Marcus.
"As leaders in online payments, it's kind of our duty to lead the way on how commerce in space will happen. This is a big problem that needs to be solved," Marcus told CNBC's Squawk on the Street.
To address this "big problem," the company, which is owned by Ebay, has enlisted the Space Tourism Society and the SETI Institute to help it launch PayPal Galactic (yes, that's the real name), an initiative to devise solutions.
Space payments are still at least a decade in the future, Marcus said, but some basic questions need to be answered. For example, he said, "If you become a merchant in space, what is the currency ... that you're going to accept? How do you manage dispute? What's an IP address from space look like? How do you do all of theses things, and what government has regulation authority over space?"
"Those are big problems that will take years to be solved, and we just want to start the conversation," he added.
PayPal hosted a conference for its new initiative on Thursday at the SETI Institute to discuss why they were venturing into the space business. Speakers from the SETI Institute, the Space Tourism Society and the Silicon Valley Space Center also voiced the necessity of payments in space at the event.
But the guest of honor at the conference was astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who shared his excitement about the growing space tourism industry and PayPal's involvement in helping develop a payment infrastructure.
"The future of space is really limitless and the door to the space frontier certainly has been opened, cracked and we're going to widen it," Aldrin said. "Trailblazers in the private sector have inspired us to think of what is bigger than Earth...We are only a generation away from a permanent human residency on Mars."

Say What? PayPal Accidentally Credits Man $92 Quadrillion

What would you do if you checked your account balance and realized that your company was suddenly in the red, owing more money than you can even imagine? That's what happened recently when online payments company PayPal accidentally credited a Pennsylvania man $92,233,720,368,547,800, according to a report by CNN.
For those of us who aren't used to counting that high, that comes out to more than $92 quadrillion. Yes, quadrillion. It's an actual number.
To its credit, PayPal quickly corrected the accounting error and offered to donate an unspecified amount of money to a charity of the man's choice. The man, who sells auto parts on eBay in his spare time, said he would have used his sudden, mind-boggling wealth to help pay down the national debt.