Just last month, UK online car classifieds site Auto4You began accepting Bitcoin payments for premium listings. Now, cars themselves are available for Bitcoin purchases.
On the main page at the time of writing is a Seat Cordoba, listed for 20 BTC.
Auto4You is a smaller listings site, with daily traffic only in the hundreds, but it is still the UK’s first classifieds site to deal in Bitcoin (normal listings are free, but users can pay the 5 GBP or the BTC equivalent for front-page listings).
The move to adopt Bitcoin payments for premium listings came at the beginning of December. Site owner Khalid Akram said at the time: “One of the biggest challenges [Bitcoin] faces in the UK is liquidity and places to spend it. We need to get the currency to flow within the community. Every time a new vendor starts accepting Bitcoin, it further legitimises the currency in people’s minds.”
Auto4You first launched in 2000, and at a given time hosts a few hundred listings for cars for sale.
The market leader in the UK is Auto Trader, which sees 11 million uniques each month and counts its listings by the hundreds of thousands. Auto Trader is owned by Trader Media Group, a company worth about 2 billion GBP, according to reports from earlier in 2013.