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The Chicago Sun-Times and startup BitWall have announced a trial paywall using bitcoin as payment for articles. The trial also involves the Taproot Foundation, which pairs professionals looking for pro bono work with non-profits, which will receive the proceeds of the payments (not the Sun-Times).

The set-up is a little complicated: Starting February 1st, for 24-hours, as soon as someone goes to Suntimes.com, they will encounter the BitWall paywall, CEO Nic Meliones tells me. To read articles, users will have to make a donation (via bitcoin) to the Taproot Foundation. The Sun-Times will then use a bitcoin exchange, like Coinbase, to convert it back to USD.

Users can also get through the paywall by tweeting about the Taproot Foundation.

While a trial basis and perhaps a little confusing, the idea is nonetheless for the Sun-Times to test out both a paywall and bitcoin transactions at once.

“We continue to experiment and test new technologies that we believe engage our readers and look forward to being the first major USA newspaper to test a Bitcoin-based paywall,” said publisher Jim Kirk.

BitWall is a payment platform that allows publications to charge a full paywall, on a time-basis or on a per article basis so users only buy the content they want to read. As of now the company does not process credit card payments. Meliones stresses how useful bitcoin is for monetizing online content.

Bitcoin has had a nice run of news recently. Just last week Overstock became one of the first major online retailers to accept bitcoin as payments. Though, like the Sun-Times, Overstock is not holding any bitcoins, instead exchanging them back for dollars immediately.

The cryptocurrency’s exchange rate has been extremely volatile as of late so it may be some time before we see companies holding onto bitcoins as an asset.

Bitcoin users provide a “public key” — a series of random letters and numbers — to whomever they’re paying (person, company, etc) who then combines it with their secret “private key”. The combination validates the transaction and most of the details are logged in a “block chain.” For all intents and purposes, transactions are irreversible and untrackable — though there have been exceptions in the past.

The US financial system has been grappling with how to deal with cryptocurrencies. Though the cases of bitcoin in use are still sparse, no doubt the payment method is taking root.

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