> What percentage of these established corporations "accept" bitcoin through VC-funded startups, receiving dollars and never actually holding a bitcoin?
Basically all of them. No established company wants the associated risk to actually hold bitcoin.
Overstock uses Coinbase for checkout and converts the majority of it to dollars immediately. They have recently begun to hold about 10% of sales made in Bitcoin as Bitcoin and have disclosed this as a risk in their latest 10-Q to investors. Bitcoin accounts for 0.25% of sales, so they're keeping 0.025% of revenue as Bitcoin.
While many may argue the prudence of such a decision (and subsequent disclosure), it's important they disclose this as their Bitcoin holdings lost about 1/2 their value in the last quarter. Any major company keeping any significant percentage of their sales revenue or cash holdings as Bitcoin would be exceedingly irresponsible.
Are you going to disclose too that Bitcoin went up 300% since last year? Or you prefer to cherry-pick a shorter time period to make it fit your narrative?
Yes, they are. But only recently, and only a small relative about. I'd forgotten that they'd started doing it a couple months back. That's why I said 'basically all of them', because every other major site I'm aware of that accepts bitcoin doesn't hold any bitcoin. It's immediately converted to dollars at sale time because holding bitcoin for even part of a day is a huge and completely unnecessary risk for a retailer.
The timeframe I mentioned is relevant to Overstock because they were not holding any bitcoin last year. They only began accepting it this year and only began holding it more recently. So only its recent (poor) performance is relevant to Overstock and its investors. As such, it would appear to have been a bad decision in the short term.
I'm not the one in this back and forth who is cherry-picking. Bitcoin up over a different timeframe (a year, since inception, etc) is irrelevant to Overstock, just as its drop to 1/2 of its value over the last few months may be less relevant to your Bitcoin holdings.
Full disclosure: I hold .24826531 Bitcoin personally and in conjunction with my open source project and run Bitcoin Core 0.9.3 64-bit on Windows.
They weren't accepting bitcoin when it was 1/3rd the current price so that figure is irrelevant(also over the past year it is now only up 50% and will be down in less than 2 weeks without some major upwards movement). They started accepting it in January when it was ~300% higher than it is now.
Basically all of them. No established company wants the associated risk to actually hold bitcoin.