When You Buy Pizza With Bitcoins, This Man Makes Money

Imagine selling lemonade on the street for £5. Imagine storing that hard-earned money in a jar and doing jack shit for a week. Suddenly, the money in your jar has grown to £50. Now imagine we're not talking about a couple of pounds, but millions. That’s sort of the situation Anthony Gallippi has found himself in.

He’s the CEO of BitPay, a company that makes it easier for pizza places, indie designers, and anarcho web providers to accept Bitcoin. Instead of having to pull out a credit card or log into Paypal and deposit money there, his software leads the consumer through an easy step-by-step interface that let’s them pay in the cryptocurrency. BitPay pays the merchant in euros, dollars or pound, while your bitcoins go to them.

But the value of those bitcoins has risen about a 1000 percent over the last month. So these are happy times for Gallippi and his company. He was kind enough to talk to us right at the start of the American holiday shopping season.