Move Bitcoin wallet to another computer

At martial arts gym Atlanta Kick, they accept credit cards, debit cards and… bitcoin.

BY SEAN SPOSITO, MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

Taka Torimoto of Atlanta uses his phone to make purchases at fast food restaurants and other places that accept alternate methods of payments from cash and credit cards.(RYON HORNE/ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/MCT

They don’t take cash.

At martial arts gym Atlanta Kick, they accept credit cards, debit cards and … bitcoin.

There is no register. Only a safe in the back and a 2-D QR code in the office underneath the price sheet that people can scan on their smartphones in order to shoot bitcoins to the gym’s digital wallet.

“If you don’t have a credit card, we don’t want you, ” co-owner Jeff Thompson said, jokingly. “Unless, of course, you have bitcoin.”

Not yet the norm as a business model, perhaps. But the martial arts studio is indicative of a surging interest in such cryptocurrencies.

Thompson likes bitcoin because it insulates him from employee theft or being robbed, he said on a recent Tuesday afternoon as kids screamed and karate-chopped around the gym.

Like serial numbers at the bottom of dollar bills, bitcoins are represented by unique identifiers on a public ledger called the block chain. Each time a unit of bitcoin moves from one digital wallet to another, its authenticity is verified and the movement is recorded in the ledger for all to see.

That’s a fundamental shift in the basis for transacting business: substituting transparency for trust. The technology behind cryptocurrencies could change our financial dealings as radically as the Internet changed how we communicate.

Practically speaking, for a karate mom paying at Atlanta Kick, the process is relatively simple. She opens an app, her digital wallet, on her Android smartphone and scans the QR code.

Her wallet stores cryptographic keys that unlock her bitcoins — which she might have acquired through a bitcoin exchange or brokerage. The app transfers ownership of the bitcoins from her wallet to the gym’s wallet, the address of which is stored in the QR code.