Not only is Wilson seeing an uptick in sales from bitcoin's continued appreciation, but other gun sellers are too. In an interview with CoinDesk, Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, said his gun sales typically increase when the bitcoin price goes up.
"Whenever bitcoin goes up, I get customers from all over the country who want to buy guns," he said, adding:
"When we first started doing this back in 2013, bitcoin was about $200. Now, it’s peaked at $4,700, and a lot of people are cashing in."
Cargill noted that his shop, which has Wilson's Ghost Gunner 2 on sale, would have seen a drop in total sales this year if not for bitcoin. About 45 percent of his revenue comes from cryptocurrency, he said.
Such a percentage of sales from bitcoin is doubly notable, seeing how Cargill can't do business with bitcoin merchant services firms like BitPay because of their policies against on-boarding guns-and-ammo businesses – a policy which BitPay said still exists, thought the initial press release detailing the policy has been removed.
BitPay and other merchant services providers have taken a conservative approach to high-risk merchants like Central Texas Gun Works, which means those businesses typically have to do a lot of the upfront acceptance work themselves.
3D-printed gun
Business backlash
And that hesitance to work with high-risk verticals is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Wilson has felt this himself, seeing strong opposition to his work in the gray area between building a machine that makes guns and actually making guns.
Back in May 2013, the files he used to print the guns were seized by the Department of Justice. Then, last year, Wilson suffered a setback when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to give him the First Amendment protections he sought for the files.
Yet, a niche community of developers has sprouted up offering their own open-source contributions to the 3D-printed gun industry, even in spite of the ongoing risk.
In spite of the obstacles, Wilson continues to push forward in disrupting the $51.3 billion gun sector, expecting to keep the Ghost Gunner 2's price steady at $1,500 in an effort to attract more sales with the price of bitcoin currently around $4,300.
"We're going to hype this like we always do," said Wilson, concluding: