The Bitcoin community is still processing the New York Department of Financial Services hearings from last week but there’s a still a lot of other news running around the media that’s worth mentioning. Right now, an interesting use of wireless technology for retail to allow mobile payments in bitcoins is on display in London that updates BTC price tags with exchange rate. BTC China has returned to the market by once again accepting yuan deposits. And, in a real coup for cryptocurrency technology, the US Postal Service ran a webinar looking into how it could leverage virtual currency in the future for a new revenue stream.

BitTag for retail mobile bitcoin payments on display in London

In what has to be the perfect-collision between the Internet of Things and Bitcoin, the BBC has run a story about a wireless price tag being shown off in a London store that displays up-to-date BTC prices for retail. The device works wirelessly for configuration, updates price regularly, and even interconnects into retail systems so that customers can buy off rack.

The prototype BitTag device, which costs about £40 [$65 USD], displays local currency as well as the Bitcoin price.

By connecting to a tablet via Bluetooth, the device is able to check the latest value of Bitcoin and change its display accordingly.

From here, a shopper can initiate a sale.

“[The] Bitcoin transaction can be activated by a simple ‘shake’ of the BitTag,” the product’s website explains. “Enabling a Bitcoin QR code to be displayed on the display and scanned by the user’s smartphone.”

For more information on this product, visit the BitTag website. The tags themselves can display a QR code for facilitating a purchase via bitcoin as well as gathered up and taken to the point-of-sale in order to concatenate multiple items for bitcoin or local currency sales.

In short, this little tag—although a little bulky seeming—is a perfect device for a retail outlet to open up to customers who want to pay via mobile.

If you’re in London and want to see BitTag in action, visit BoxPark Shoreditch —an interesting little “pop-up” shopping mall built out of shipping containers set up in the heart of London.

BTC China back in business accepting cash deposits once again

In good news for the Chinese market for bitcoins, as previously reported on SiliconAngle, BTC China has begun taking deposits in yuan once again. Cash deposits appeared on BTC China’s backend interface without much fanfare in an almost-stealth change in the policy, as reported by Mike Wheatley,

There’s been no official announcement from BTC China yet, with the first hint of this development coming from Reddit. According to a posting by @btc_trading, the exchange began accepting deposits again yesterday, charges no deposit fees and has a turn-around time of about two hours. Since then, several other users have also posted to say that BTC China is indeed accepting bank deposits, but only from the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank – the same method used by Huobi.com and 796.com, two smaller Chinese Bitcoin exchanges.

BTC China stopped accepting deposits back on December 18, 2013 as part of attempting to comply with changes in the Chinese money-exchange policy. Over the past month and a half questions have arisen about China’s position in the Bitcoin marketplace and the return of this particular big exchange should be good news.

The US Postal Service and Bitcoin?

On January 29, 2014 the US Postal Service held an online webinar in the form of a virtual forum questioning the capability of the USPS getting into cryptocurrencies and virtual currencies. Some of the discussion included if the USPS could act as a brick-and-mortar location where people could exchange BTC for local currency (i.e. act as an in-person bitcoin exchange) as well as if the USPS could use “colored coins” to increase adoption.

A thorough and interesting analysis of the proceedings is published on CoinDesk.

This online forum comes at a time when the USPS is struggling to stay viable in a grim economy. As costs go up to operate the infrastructure of the Postal Service questions have been raised about increasing the price of stamps to reducing the days of operation—as a result, the USPS has been looking for further opportunities to produce revenue streams.

The USPS can already act as a money transmitter (the major hurdle for many bitcoin operations and exchanges when attempting to stay on the right side of murky regulation) and as a result the USPS could be the perfect space for cryptocurrency exchange.

The online forum hit such a high point that Bloomberg TV even ran a small segment on it.

Although the proceedings of the online forum and presentation went well, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing much motion from the USPS for several years. Cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, are still in the opening stages of adoption and innovation and do not represent a large enough market to pull in a slow-moving agency such as the US Postal Service.

Quote of the week

In light of the Bitcoin hearings in New York, SiliconAngle reached out to BitPay to ask about the outlook for the cryptocurrency in the future and where regulation seems to be headed. Stephanie Wargo, BitPay’s VP of Marketing, gave us some insight to share with you.

“I think government officials are getting a better understanding of Bitcoin,” Wargo said when asked about the NYDFS proceedings. “Just like with any other form of payment, they (the government) has the ability to catch individuals that are not following the laws that are in place.”

She went on to show great confidence in the adoption and development of Bitcoin during 2014. Adding, “We expect to see more growth with large retailors both online and brick and mortar. The same as 2013; adding more liquidity to the market.  People need easier access to obtain bitcoins; it’s the reason we created the Payroll API.”