Science & Technology

BTCDelta Is Leading the Charge to Bring Bitcoin to Mainstream Consumers

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a bitcoin
Credit: Casascius

Corporations and small entrepreneurs around the world are making Bitcoin more accessible and incorporating the digital currency into the market every day. A Bitcoin wallet, Coin Pocket, showed up on Apple's app store for the first time yesterday. Expedia just became the first major travel agency to accept Bitcoin last week. Now Delta Financial wants to bring the mainstream consumer a service that is essential to any capital market—savings accounts.

BTCDelta is a web service that allows you to invest both Bitcoin and U.S. dollars (USD). Interest rates on the savings accounts will be in constant fluctuation.

BTCDelta also provides a marginal trading platform to help people make money by trading Bitcoin against the dollar. The system they have in place ensures liquidity, finds the best prices on reliable Bitcoin exchanges, and offers 5x leverage to individuals that are experienced in currency trading. Once a person makes a marginal deposit, BTCDelta will lend up to five times the deposited amount to that person for trading. The investor will then be able to take both short and long positions on the currencies, switching value in between Bitcoin accounts and USD accounts depnding on whether he or she thinks the Bitcoin price will go up or down. Euwyn Poon, co-founder of the company, told Coindesk, "So deposit accounts reward savers, and on the flip side, active margin traders can take out loans with up to five times leverage."

Following the disaster at Mt. Gox, where hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin mysteriously disappeared, people are wary of giving up control over their Bitcoin. After all, one of the most appealing aspects of the digital currency is its decentralized nature. BTCDelta says it is ensuring protection from theft by keeping most of the funds off-line in cold storage, using encrypted SSL (HTTPS), and allowing investors to use two-factor authentication for added security. 

Bitcoin has maintained a position on the fringe of our economy for most of its existence, but services such as BTCDelta—along with Bitcoin wallets on smartphones and acceptance by prominent companies—will play an enormous role in the introduction of digital currencies into mainstream society.