Its No Silk Road: Data Center Operator Is Accepting Bitcoin Payment

Data center developer Server Farm Realty LLC is among the first companies to accept Bitcoin money.

Bitcoin is open-source digital currency. It’s made news for inadvertently facilitating the Silk Road black market where people could buy drugs and hit men. But some legit firms now are looking to Bitcoin to give customers different ways to pay their bills.  

Avner Papouchado, Server Farm Realty’s CEO, said the approach “make[s] it easy for companies to work with us.”

To use bitcoins, customers must have an address that serves as a safety deposit box of sorts for the currency. Then, to access their bitcoins, each company must have a unique, digital private key. That private key signs a message indicating the input, amount and output address, and the designated recipient, who also must be able to accept bitcoins. Finally, the bitcoin wallet distributes the payment through a third-party provider that measures and verifies the payment, and decodes the message to complete the transaction.

Server Farm Realty runs data centers in the United States and Canada.