Welcome To Bitcoin, USA: St. Petersburg Merchants Embrace Cryptocurrency Before ‘Bitcoin Bowl’

At The Alligator Attraction in Madeira Beach, Florida, tourists can learn about koi fish, take photos with a tortoise, or feed huge alligators. But come Monday, visitors who stop by the attraction will be able to do something even stranger: Theyll be able to pay for those experiences using bitcoin.

The Alligator Attraction is one of 86 businesses in Madeira Beach -- a 2-mile-long town near St. Petersburg -- that are gearing up to accept bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency. Thats because Madeira Beach is a partner of the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl football game and recently became the first city in the world to officially embrace bitcoin.

Its the age of technology. Its time to move forward with payments, said Sonny Flynn, the business manager of The Alligator Attraction and two other Madeira Beach businesses that are set to begin accepting bitcoin.

Madeira Beach has always been a tourism hotspot, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each year who want to relax on the small towns sugar white sand beach, go deep-sea fishing off its shores, or have dinner and drinks at its boardwalk eateries. But after Madeira Beach was picked to host the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowls annual Beach Bash event through 2016, the citys leaders figured they could get themselves extra publicity and lure more travelers by becoming a tourism destination for bitcoin users around the globe.

Late last month, the city passed a resolution to begin accepting bitcoin for certain payments. Residents can now use the cryptocurrency to pay for boat fuel and fishing tackle at the city-run marina, and come next year, theyll be able to pay for parking tickets using the code-based money. In the meantime, city officials are in a mad rush to sign up as many businesses as they can by Christmas Eve, the day of the Beach Bash.

That event is expected to draw as many as 5,000 visitors to the small town to watch the players from the University of Central Florida and North Carolina State University as they compete in silly beach events like Hoola Hoop and belly-flop contests before they face off on the gridiron. By then, Madeira Beach officials hope it will be possible for tourists to go the entire day in the city making payments using nothing but bitcoin.

"Bitcoin users are very loyal to it. Theyre into it, and if they find a city where they can go and use it, they are going to book their vacation there, said Misty Wells, a spokeswoman for Madeira Beach.

To use bitcoin in the real world, consumers have to sign up for a bitcoin wallet. They can do that through services such as Trucoin or Airbitz, which will be signing up fans at the game on Dec. 26. After that, consumers exchange dollars for bitcoin, and then go to a merchant that accepts the cryptocurrency. At the point of payment, the merchant will show the consumer a code that they scan using their smartphone. The code tells their bitcoin wallet who to send the payment to, which occurs after the consumer enters the amount owed and approves the payment.

Madeira Beach officials hope to get more than 100 merchants, or more than 80 percent of the citys businesses, signed up to accept bitcoin by game day. Helping them in that effort is BitPay, a bitcoin-processing startup based out of Atlanta and the title sponsor of the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl through 2016. BitPays goal for the game is to get bitcoin further into the mainstream, said Stephanie Wargo, BitPay vice president of marketing.

"We thought that this was a nice, easy, fun introduction to the masses on what bitcoin is, Wargo said. The game needed it to be somewhere that we could make a destination place that even after the bowl game all of these businesses could still attract bitcoin consumers to their business. We wanted to make sure it was some place that you would want to come and visit. Being next to the beach, it makes it quite nice.

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Welcome To Bitcoin, USA: St. Petersburg Merchants Embrace Cryptocurrency Before 'Bitcoin Bowl'