Australian Organic Farm encouraging local businesses to accept bitcoin

In a bid to facilitate bitcoin payments, Budafoods, a small, certified organic farm and food supplier located in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Queensland, Australia, is making efforts to create a closed bitcoin economy among farmers. It aims to encourage its partners, supporting businesses and community to accept bitcoin, Bitcoin Magazine reports.

Budafoods and other local businesses have been adversely affected by online payment services and platforms such as PayPal and banking systems in the past few years. They not only have to pay a considerable transaction fee but also face troubles at these platforms have been extremely inefficient.

Mark Burgunder, Budafoods founder, came across bitcoin while searching a cheaper, yet quicker, payment method.

“My main reason for attempting to get others to accept bitcoins is that I love the speed and ease of bitcoin payments and have a distrust of most central banking methods,” Burgunder told Bitcoin Magazine.

Budafoods is trying to persuade local businesses in its community to accept and pay them in bitcoin, as it is quicker and economical than other online payment methods available in the country.

“We are supplying one of the local restaurants and would be more than happy to accept payment in bitcoins from this restaurant. We feel this should make it easier to allow the restaurant to accept bitcoins from tourists and, in turn, pay us for supplies with the bitcoins they’ve accepted,” said Burgunder.

He also explained that the use of multi-signature wallets between a supplier and a business will be much more efficient than any other payment method/systems available today.

“I’d envisage in an escrow scenario we’d pay for the purchase into a multi-sig wallet with one of the signatures being ours, with us signing a transaction to release the funds to the supplier once we’ve received the shipment,” explained Burgunder. “With the supplier also having one of the multi-sig keys it wouldn’t be possible for us to just withdraw the funds, giving the supplier certainty that the funds will not disappear on them. I feel this would help incentivize the supplier to assist in speedy and hassle-free delivery as in this scenario it would be in their interest to have the shipment arrive with us in a timely manner.”