It’s already November and therefore a good time to prepare for Black Friday and the upcoming Bitcoin Black Friday. November 28th will be a date to save with all the deals that will be released to the Bitcoin community. Be sure to sign up for e-mail updates so you don’t miss it!

Also in this issue: BloomNation talks flowers and accepting bitcoins; Circle releases Android and iOS apps; Blockstream receive $21 million in funding; the next round of Dread Pirate Roberts bitcoins being sold by the U.S. Marshals; and Coinbase releases its own tipping button.

Bitcoin Black Friday is coming

November 28th this year is the retail holiday Black Friday and along with it the Bitcoin Black Friday deal-making event is also approaching.

Bitcoin Black Friday Jon Holmquist says that he expects to see 6,000 merchants this year—that’s ten times the number who joined in 2013—and that the expected deals will be released on November 26th.

This will be the third year that Bitcoin Black Friday as run and it has only gotten bigger each year. For more information see SiliconANGLE’s post on the 2014 event.

BloomNation embraces Bitcoin as a disruptive technology

Internet flower arrangement and delivery service, BloomNation started accepting bitcoin in January this year, and then in July 1-800-Flowers.com announced it would be taking bitcoins. The beginning of this year, BloomNation partnered with Coinbase to accept bitcoins for Internet-based flower delivery.

BloomNation’s mission statement is to disrupt the way that Internet flower delivery works by acting as a service that connects people with local florists and then getting out of the way. The process involves local small businesses, the florists send an image of the final arrangement to the customer before delivery (no stock photos), and it allows for same-day hand delivery.

“A lot of people who would not have traditionally sent flowers today, have now sent flowers online because of bitcoin,” says Gregg Weisstein, Co-Founder and COO of BloomNation.com. He feels that accepting bitcoins has opened up BloomNation to that niche customer.

According to Weisstein, bitcoin transactions represent a very small amount of total revenue—less than 1 percent—but that the team sees bitcoin orders come in all the time.

“It’s pretty exciting,” he adds. “The business gets a separate notification from Coinbase on bitcoin orders.”

When asked how he feels about a direct competitor, 1-800-Flowers.com beginning plans to accept bitcoin when BloomNation already had been accepting bitcoin, Weisstein says getting on board with bitcoin wasn’t about the competition. The company chose bitcoin because of the technology and its future and not to outdo anyone else.

So far, Weisstein says that company’s experience with bitcoin customers and Coinbase as a customer has been rewarding and good for the company.

[Editor’s note: A previous version of this segment mixed up January and July as the dates of 1-800-Flowers announcement and BloomNation’s acceptance of bitcoin. This has been corrected.]

Circle Android and iOS apps for the masses

The Bitcoin web-wallet service Circle, which launched in September, has released mobile apps for iOS and Android. If you happen to have a device that runs either operating system you can get the app on Circle’s website.

The apps both support the same look-and-feel of the website, molded for a smaller screen than a PC browser, and provide fairly the same functionality. Users can deposit and withdraw from a bank account, transfer bitcoins, as well as send and receive bitcoin payments.

The apps are protected by multi-factor security systems, a PIN code, and TouchID.

Blockstream closes a $21 million funding round

Blockstream, a company started by a group of cryptography and Bitcoin luminaries, has just received $21 in investment funding. The objective behind Blockstream is to provide the foundation for producing side-chain technology that can be built onto the Bitcoin blockchain to enable different currencies, mechanisms, and methods of providing services based on Bitcoin.

For more information on exactly what Blockstream is and the company’s mission check out SiliconANGLE’s previous coverage.

This funding round attracted a number of big names, according to the Wall Street Journal, including Billionaire entrepreneurs who helped lead LinkedIn Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

The three investment leads were Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and Canadian firm Real Ventures. The total list of contributors reaches for 40 including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s AME Ventures.

Blockstream expects to use the money to push the Bitcoin sidechains project that is hoped to innovate around the already prolific strength of the Bitcoin technology.

U.S. Marshals Service to auction off 50,000 BTC

It’s the next round of the sized booty from the raid on Silk Road and its proprietor The Dread Pirate Roberts—alleged to be Ross William Ulbricht. The previous 30,000 BTC auctioned by the USMS was sold to one bidder who turned out to be Tim Draper.

Now, 50,000 BTC are back on the auction block, according to the USMS website posting about the auction.

The auction is named “DPR Bitcoins,” due to the knowledge that these bitcoins were sized directly from Dread Pirate Robert’s personal stash and not from the Silk Road 3rd party cache.

The auction started taking bids 9:00am EST on Monday, November 17th and will end noon EST on Monday, December 1st. The auction is split into two series—A and B—with A containing 10 blocks totaling 2,000 BTC and B containing 10 blocks totaling 3,000 BTC. Interested buyers are required to make a deposit of $100,000 and $150,000 respectively for series A and B.

Winners will be announced on Friday, December 5, by 5:00pm EST.

Coinbase releases tipping button

Possibly spurred on by a surge in tipping behavior led by ChangeTip—which has been going viral on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere recently—Coinbase has released its own tipping button that can be embedded into webpages.

The button can be easily embedded into any web page and enables any visitor to tip BTC using a Coinbase account or any other wallet.

In an culturally-centric move, Coinbase’s tip button also follows the new convention of using “bits”—or one-millionth of a BTC, 100 bits is approximately $0.03 currently–as the metric for measuring bitcoin flow.

The default for the tip button is 300 bits (or approximately $0.10.)

You can even try it out below if you’d like to tip me for this post.