This year, Black Friday occurs on Friday, November 29. This event for most retailers represents a huge rush of shoppers seeking deals before year’s end in a heady, berserk rush to find the best prices of the entire year—and at the same time retailers often see it represent most of their revenue for the entire year.

Bitcoin Friday this year will bring over merchants to the table offering deals to bitcoin-buying shoppers. BitPay is adding a merchant directory to put merchants and enthusiasts together (for the other 364 days of the year.) And supporting those merchants, BitWasp has released a free, open-source ecommerce platform that focuses on bitcoin.

Bitcoin Friday

This year, Bitcoin enthusiasts will be celebrating their own Black Friday with Jon Holmquist’s Bitcoin Black Friday that takes the name from the marketing juggernaut of Black Friday and puts it to work for merchants who accept bitcoin. And with sponsorship from merchants and merchant-services such as Private Internet Access, Gyft, and the Bitcoin payment processors BitPay and Coinbase it will be an amazing experience.

“Bitcoin is a great tool for merchants at every level,” says Jon Holmquist, the founder of Bitcoin Friday, ”because it is decentralized (making it nearly free to send and receive money) the deals merchants can offer are a lot lower than any deals they’ve been able to offer before.”

Holmquist expects Bitcoin Friday to be even bigger than last year—where Bitcoin Friday collected 75 deals—by offering over 100 deals on the website.

Customers are invited to join the site now so that when the deals become active on Friday they can take immediate advantage of them; as well as merchants who can still sign up to be listed as part of the event. The result from last year was a notable success and with even more merchants on board this year it can only get bigger and better than before.

“Here at GSM Nation, we’re big supporters of open-source technology, and we’re thrilled to be participating in Bitcoin Friday,” said Ahmed Khattek, CEO of GSM Nation who will be offering a deal on Nov 29th, “We see bitcoins as a paradigm shifting innovation that will greatly reduce inefficiencies in the marketplace.”

Aside from technology companies such as GSM Nation offering deals, Bitcoin Friday also supports numerous charities for the holiday-giving-season minded such as Sean’s Outpost, Antiwar.com, Bitcoin Foundation, and Symphony of Science. The BitGive Foundation–a new non-profit that collects bitcoins and distributes them to public health and environmental charities–will be accepting Bitcoin donations on behalf of Save the Children to aid in disaster relief efforts in the Philippines.

BitPay Merchant Directory

This past Monday, November 25, BitPay announced the launch of a global bitcoin directory that features many of the world’s greatest bitcoin-accepting merchants.

“We are often asked where to spend bitcoins and this global directory allows bitcoin merchants around the world to get discovered,” says Tony Gallippi, BitPay co-founder and CEO. “With this service we will be linking over 5 million bitcoin users with merchants and we will continue adding more merchants.”

Two high notoriety clients of BitPay with listings on the new BitPay Bitcoin Directory happen to be Takeaway.com and PC Game Supply.

Looking to food delivery in Europe, Takeaway.com represents more then 300,000 restaurants across the pond. By accepting bitcoins, Takeaway.com allows people who exchange with this cryptocurrency to get pizza delivered to their door or perhaps get a delicious Bitcoin-funded sandwich.

PC Game Supply strikes at the heart of every gamer who also has an interesting in exchanging with bitcoins. In an interesting sort of value-for-exchange, PC Game Supply provides a place to change bitcoins for gift cards across numerous video game and technology related service such as iTunes, NEXON, CCP Game’s EvE Online game time and even Blizzard World of Warcraft game time.

Of course, Roger Ver’s BitcoinStore, which made a name for itself by being a bitcoin-only online electronics store is also on the list. Although Bigpoint Games is not yet listed, even though this free-to-play game publisher accepts bitcoins for in-game virtual currency.

BitPay has done a great deal lately to make itself one of the foremost bitcoin payment service provider for eCommerce and B2B solutions—adding more discoverable merchants to the ecology will no doubt provide a boost to everyone.

BitWasp: Bitcoin for e-commerce merchants and developers

Third-party Bitcoin payment processors are nice for merchants who want to avoid the volatility of the value of bitcoins; but such services also tend to add a third-party to an exchange that doesn’t need one. As a result, merchants who want to keep all of their transactions in house want software that supports it.

To bridge this gap, BitWasp takes the stage. An open source software solution, this ecommerce platform provides merchants a way to immediately start up a bitcoin business with high security, encrypted communication, payment processing (via BTC), and an encrypted on-server live wallet.

BitWasp, of course, also allows for integration with a third-party Bitcoin processor service such as BitPay or Coinbase; but for those interested in the live wallet option also have high security options at hand.

To add to the security of the platform, the founders of BitWasp commented to CoinDesk that the software allows the use of an offline wallet. “Live wallets are a huge target for attackers, so we have settings which allow administrators to send funds to an offline wallet if the live wallet ever exceeds a specific balance.”

What will really make BitWasp shine in the bitcoin market is its high availability to developers as well. Not only is it a free, open source platform available on GitHub, there is also a BitWasp developers forum for those interested in integrating it into existing platforms or extending its functionality.

Ask Dr. Bitcoin

So you’re new to Bitcoin and you want to avoid scams check out this week’s “Ask Dr. Bitcoin” for a simple guide on how to get your first bitcoin and spend it safely. And, if you feel the itch, ask a question.