There are several crypto-firms such as BitGo and Coinbase that provide this kind of service as an intermediary between companies/merchants/service providers that want to accept bitcoin payment without have to deal with the hassle of convert bitcoin into fiat currency. Any company or merchant can add bitcoin payment as an option, since bitcoin become more famous and attract many people. This is why the government should let crypto-firms and companies to adopt bitcoin as an alternative payment method, besides there are a lot of them out there.

When this comes up it is sort of double edged sword news for me.

I want to pay for nothing with Bitcoin. Maybe 12-18 months after a halving I would not mind paying for something in bitcoin, but screw paying for things with it, especially say right now for example. Ten dollars in btc could turn into 1000 bucks really easily.

Being able to pay for things in bitcoin is good for business owners. It is also good for bitcoin and legitimacy. It's not good for bitcoin holders though.

Options are good but people have to understand, what is going on with bitcoin right now is smart money is starting to wake up and do all they can to extract btc from the people.

The service expansion with bitcoin acceptance keeps increasing in the global market. However it hasn't reached the direct usage. Anyhow it's a good move, because something close to the government service being done with bitcoin acceptance is a big thing.

Somehow the third party involvement is always found with most of the services with bitcoin acceptance. The real state of adoption is the direct usage and the reason for which bitcoin has been innovated is to eliminate the third party involvement.

Kinda neat option to have honestly, though I doubt there’s much interest in paying with BTC for their visas at this point in time due to the recent surge in prices, but it’s a welcome option nonetheless. Even with third-party integration, more services opening for bitcoin or crypto payments is welcome, until such time that these services figure out that keeping crypto as is would also be beneficial. I think PayPal’s initial announcement ushered a new trend for companies to accept btc and crypto again after its initial phase 5 years ago, with Bitpay manning the payment processing helm.

I'm very surprised you need to go through a company to get a US passport. Surely this is a government function ? Is this company skimming on top by helping you gather paperwork, photoID etc., make you pay for that, then you get your passport through the government anyway ?

That's the question, but you might be surprise since demand for using bitcoin is increasing. This is for convenience  too as others needs option and bitcoin is the right choice for tech savvy who wants ease and secured payment. There are many business wo are using the cypro platform and its  no surprise that government agencies  and major companies are slowly adopting this new financial derivative.

Just never think about the number of people who will be using this service as it's a new service and you can't expect a lot of people will be using this service.

I personally put my focus on more exposure to crypto. This sounds good for bitcoin to be adopted by various service.
Bitcoin has a new company in the US started to adopt it and more to come soon.