Community news-sharing site Reddit is the latest in a small (but growing) list of online services that are now accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment.

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency that uses decentralized (peer-to-peer) technology to manage transactions and validate payments instead of a government-regulated banking system. Anyone can convert their local country’s currency into Bitcoins, making it a universal form of trade for any company that accepts it.

Part of Reddit’s business strategy is selling “Reddit Gold” subscriptions that sports experimental features that you can use before they roll out to all users. Reddit Gold can be purchased in one-month increments for $4 or $30 per year for yourself or as a gift to others. The site also started letting people buy a month of gold to people who made particularly useful or witty comments. And until recently, Reddit only accepted PayPal and Google Wallet to pay for gold subscriptions, but it has now added both Bitcoin and credit cards to its list of payment options.

The move should give the news sharing site a boost in revenue, especially from international users that are unable to pay via credit card or PayPal for one reason or another.

“Unredeemed game tickets from state fair midways are the next currency we’re going to add,” joked Reddit developer Brian Simpson, who is responsible for the site’s new Bitcoin integration. “[We] just need to figure out how to handle garbage bags full of them in our mailroom.”

Simpson told VentureBeat that Bitcoin payment was something that Reddit’s community had requested for a while now. The site is using Y Combinator-backed Bitcoin exchange startup Coinbase to handle all transactions, which made the process of integrating the digital currency relatively straightforward, he said.

Reddit joins a handful of organizations now accepting Bitcoin payments: Dewlance, Diaspora, 4chan, Wiki Leaks, Uploaded.to, The Internet Archive, and, more recently, WordPress operator Automattic.

Yet the vast majority of businesses are not on board, which could have something to do with Bitcoin’s perception of being an unsecure method of payment as well as the currency of choice for criminals. But that may change over time since Bitcoin doesn’t have the same limitations as a currency that’s tied to a government.

“On our end there’s less risk because there’s no such thing as a Bitcoin chargeback,” Simpson said in reference to banks/credit companies reversing the initial purchase by disputing its legitimacy, thus leaving the business empty-handed. “Someone could get their Bitcoin wallet stolen, but it seems like protecting your wallet is one of the fundamental issues with Bitcoin.”

And in terms of losing money, Reddit also won’t be keeping a balance of Bitcoins, which will minimize the odds of those payments being compromised/stolen by hackers and protect against the possibility of a low currency exchange rate, according to Reddit CEO Yishan Wong.

In a comment thread announcing the new payment option, Wong offered a good explanation for how Reddit will handle the digital currency:

With legitimized exchanges like Coinbase offering bank-level encryption (and processing over $1 million worth of Bitcoin transactions per month), it may just be a matter of time before it starts appearing next to PayPal, Visa, Master Card, and Google Wallet — especially with support from Reddit’s highly effective active user base.

Top image via Reddit Postcards

Reddit is apparently raising a fresh round of funding that could help propel the site forward in its delicate pursuit of translating its popularity into profitability, reports AllThingsD.

In the current investment climate, it’s not unreasonable for hot Internet services to gain several million dollars and multiple rounds of funding. And Reddit certainly qualifies as a hot property, bringing in upward of 3.8 billion monthly page views and over 46 million monthly unique visitors.

However, the community news sharing site is said to be seeking only $1 million, according to ATD’s sources. That’s a mere fraction of what Reddit could raise. But the smaller figure does make sense, if you consider that Reddit’s valuation without fresh funding is already very high.

Earlier this week TechCrunch reported that the rumored round could push Reddit’s valuation to an estimated $400 million. And if Reddit is only raising $1 million, it means that the company can be very selective about who participates in the investment.

According to ATD’s sources, the new round will consist entirely of angel investors. If true, this decision would make a lot of sense considering Reddit’s history of prioritizing its community over the pressure to make money. Unlike investment firms, a selectively chosen group of angels would enable Reddit’s management team to continue this strategy.

That said, I’d imagine plenty of deep-pocket angel investors in the tech community are interested in participating in the round. For example, Cheezburger Network founder Ben Huh, who once offered to buy Reddit from Conde Nast years ago. Also, Reddit cofounders Alexis Ohanian (who is on Reddit’s board) and Steve Huffman would both be likely candidates to participate in the round. How about former Vice President Al Gore, who at one point was interested in purchasing rival site Digg and who recently came into a very large sum of money from the Current TV acquisition?

Point being, Reddit’s current situation allows it to determine a precise amount of funding as well as an all-star team of angel investors/advisers/door-openers.

Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast for a song back in 2006, and it eventually surpassed rival news community Digg just four years later despite receiving relatively little money. In 2011, Reddit’s small team of employees launched the Reddit Gold voluntary paid subscription plan to increase its resources, which eventually led to Conde Nast spinning off Reddit into its own independent entity under parent company Advance Publications. Since then Reddit has added many new employees (including its first-ever CEO Yishan Wong), grown Reddit Gold subscriptions, and continued to upgrade the site with new features.

We’ve reached out to both Reddit and Wong for comment about the potential new funding, and we’ll update this post with any new information.

Community news sharing site Reddit released some impressive new traffic statistics today that confirm the site is continuing its trend of crazy upward growth.

The site brought in over 3.8 billion page views and more than 46 million unique visitors in October, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote in a company blog post today. That’s double the number of page views the site was pulling in during the same month last year.

But all that growth also brings higher operating costs — such as servers to handle the increased traffic, hiring new engineers, and more — which it plans to pay for by revitalizing its voluntary Reddit Gold paid subscriptions.

“We have a choice to make: We can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through Reddit gold,” Yishan wrote. “Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users.”

Users can pay a $3.99 monthly fee for Reddit Gold or opt for a $29.99 annual fee. Additionally, users can buy their friends a month of the service. The optional subscription gives users access to a handful of perks, like loading more comments automatically on a page, seeing new comments highlighted upon returning to a page, the ability to turn off display ads, and more. Additionally, the company is adding a few more perks, like saving comments and filtering saved submissions by subreddit (aka sub categories within Reddit). Some of the perks will end up rolling out to all users, but Gold subscribers get first access.

Yishan also said the company is exploring more ways to add value to Gold subscriptions, such as working with retailers to bring exclusive deals to Gold subscribers. If this does pan out, it could provide Reddit with another source of revenue (depending on the deal), without having to worry about pissing off its hardcore users with lots of ads and promotional marketing.