Dish Network Announces It's the Largest Company to Accept Bitcoin

The satellite TV company says it will begin accepting the digital coins through payment processor Coinbase by September. Coinbase will instantly convert the Bitcoins into cash, eliminating the risk of price fluctuations to Dish.

Dish's chief operating officer, Bernie Han, says the idea came from company employees who had become avid Bitcoin users.

While Han says demand for the payment system is unclear, it aligns the Englewood, Colorado, company's high-tech offerings - such as the ability to watch live TV on mobile devices - with the tech-savvy customers it is trying to reach.

He also said Coinbase's payment processing fee is attractive compared to the average of what it pays to other processors.

Earlier this month, a Colorado lawmaker to started accepting donations in Bitcoin, and those transactions too, were handled by Coinbase. Coinbase in these cases is like a middleman between merchants and consumers, where the latter use Coinbase to send Bitcoins for payments to the businesses.

Following the collapse of Mt. Gox, Coinbase sought to shore up confidence in the currency by saying Mt. Gox's collapse was an isolated case of mismanagement. They said it had abused users' trust, but did not offer details on how. "As with any new industry, there are certain bad actors that need to be weeded out, and that is what we are seeing today," a statement at the time had read.

Written with agency inputs