Great Lakes Science Center starts accepting bitcoin payments via BitPay

Great Lakes Science Center, an Ohio-based museum and educational facility, will start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method from today, November 13, Crain’s Cleveland Business reported.

With this, Great Lakes Science Center joins two other American Museums – the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Texas and St. Petersburg Museum of History in Florida – who accept cryptocurrency as a payment method. It will use BitPay to process the transactions.

The decision to accept bitcoin comes ahead of the four-day Blockland Solutions Conference. The inaugural event will be held next month and will accept payment in cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin, as well as U.S. dollars.

"There is a lot of excitement around the conference," said Great Lakes Science Center president and CEO Kirsten Ellenbogen in a statement. "Accepting bitcoin is just a small part of the momentum to grow a blockchain ecosystem in Cleveland."

Ellenbogen said that the move also underscores the museum's own innovative efforts as it supports the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math.

"Last year we launched our mobile app that uses augmented and virtual reality to allow guests to experiment with flames in space and test spacecraft designs re-entering Earth's atmosphere when they visit the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, and now they'll be able to use their phone to pay for their admission using Bitcoin," she said.