A Taiwanese airline on Wednesday announced that they would be accepting Bitcoins for tickets to their flights and other related travel services.

Passengers flying with Far Eastern Air Transport (FAT) can now pay for more than 20,000 flights with Bitcoin.

The airline was established in 1957 and used to be the most used carrier in Taiwan. But with this new announcement, FAT is well on its way to attracting more customers.

Taiwan’s central bank governor, back in October, supported the move to regulate cryptocurrency and said that Bitcoin trading should be added to a list of assets directly under their money laundering prevention law, which in a way legitimised its use in Taiwan. This stance is very similar to the one taken by Japanese authorities which too, in a way, legalized Bitcoins in Japan.

FAT is the first Taiwanese airline to accept Bitcoins as a mode of payment. However, FAT is not the first in the world. In fact, it is far from that. The first airline that started to accept Bitcoin payments, Latvia AirBaltic, did so in 2014. Subsequently, many other airlines followed in its footsteps like Japan’s Peach airline and Surf Air, etc. Poland’s LOT airlines started to accept bitcoin payments in 2015, however since have decided that it wasn’t for them and withdrew support in 2017.

One of the earliest uses of bitcoin was to buy pizza since then a lot of other global fast-food chains have started accepting bitcoins too in some countries. Like KFC in Canada, Subway, etc. Cryptocurrencies are also accepted at other big names like Microsoft, Tesla and Wikimedia, the owners and curators of Wikipedia.

While the adoption of cryptocurrency as a mode of payment is a huge step towards making a stronger base argument for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from a legal standpoint, a lot of companies are feigning acceptance.

With the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency repeatedly in the media for something or the other, it has become almost a style statement to associate companies with the cryptocurrency market because it increases their traction and widens their customer base. But the fact remains that the adoption of cryptocurrency as a payment mode does make products more convenient to buy.   

Ramaa Mohan