re: You can spend bitcoins at your local mall

You quote seems a little disingenuous. It is just a proxy service to allow you to buy gift cards with bitcoins, which you can then take to the mall to purchase items. It doesn't seem much different than some of the other bitcoin offerings.

I will be interesting if Google jumps into this digital currency market in a big way. It seems like they would have a pretty easy time integrating all of their restaurant customers using Breadcrumbs POS to accept the payments from google wallets seamlessly.