No More Bitcoin at the MSFT Store

Microsoft has quietly stopped supporting bitcoin payments just over one year after it added support for the crypto currency within the Windows Store.

You can no longer redeem Bitcoin into your Microsoft account. Existing balances in your account will still be available for purchases from Microsoft Store, but can’t be refunded.

Microsoft was lauded for adopting bitcoin back at the end of 2014. The company, which partnered with payment firm Bitpay, said at the time that the move was a sign of “giving people options and helping them do more on their devices and in the cloud.”

It isn’t clear what has happened since then, presumably few Microsoft customers used the payment option which made its retention unnecessary.

Microsoft’s move comes amid challenging times for the bitcoin community, which is divided on whether the digital currency needs to make major changes to its infrastructure in order to increase its capacity in response to growth.