Amazon is the biggest threat to Bitcoin right now
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
You are thinking of Consumers in the West, almost all of who have Bank Accounts, Credit Cards and in these cases, your statement makes sense.
However, a large majority of the developing world still works on Cash economy. And in rural areas in these regions, most people don't have bank accounts, credit cards with with to shop on Amazon. They do have mobile phones with internet.
So it would make sense for Amazon to use crypto-currency to allow such people to make purchases on it's site.
Do you know that Amazon in India has a COD feature (Cash on Delivery), so the dude delivers your package and takes cash from you for your purchase from Amazon.in.
Wouldn't it be simpler to partner with various retail outlets to let cash based consumers load their amazon accounts with cash (via gift cards or other means), or even issue Amazon branded debit cards that these people can top up in store?
I mean cash on delivery and cash on delivery to a convenience store are both real and very popular options in Japan (the former with pretty rampant delivery fraud issues, but that's another can of worms), an affluent country where many consumer can get credit cards, but one where culturally people are skeptical of financial products and prefer to deal in cash.
Right now, you have to open an account with 1 of the exchanges, like Kraken, or Bitstamp, or GDAX, or wallets like Coinbase, link your Bank account and wire money in.
This is like the Wild West these days, with horror stories of wire transfers not getting credited for weeks and some not getting any response from customer support (all do email only, no phone). I think they are also having a hard time with the insane spike in interest. Kraken CEO is claiming that they are seeing 50,000 Account openings per day[1] and are not able to handle it and hence the 5XX HTTP errors that people are seeing on their site.
> This blaze is on fire.
> The recent, unexpected explosion in demand has been overwhelming. Each of the past few days has produced 50,000 new account registrations and 10,000 new support tickets — an order of magnitude above where we were just last quarter. Concurrent users, daily trades and volumes are also hitting new all-time highs. We are struggling to keep up.
[1] Source: https://blog.kraken.com/post/1399/degraded-service-upgrade-n...
One thing I'm still not able to wrap my head around is this. In order to 'BUY' Crypto currency, you have to pay plain old Paper currency like USD or JPY (referred to as FIAT currency in the crypto world). So how does this make Crypto like Bitcoin an independent currency? There are also some stories that 40% of Bitcoin is 'OWNED' by less than 1000 individuals / institutions around the world. That's not the case with paper money though.
I would expect that they will adopt a large number all at once and accept whatever the customer wants to pay with. They currently support dozens of currencies so a few dozen more is really just a case of customer demand.
As soon as customers want to pay with a cryptocurrecy, Amazon will roll out.
What would be really surprising is if they make their own cryptocurrency for use on Fire devices or something that would reduce their credit card processing fees.
Bitcoin is decentralized and not regulated, whereas alt-currencies / "alt-coins" like Ripple are centralized and regulated by the Company and several Banks including Amex, non-profits like Gates Foundation, have come on board and use Ripple for Liquidity and speed and lowered costs ( no-need to maintain Nostro, Vostro accounts in FIAT currencies) in international markets.
From a Ripple presentation slide from a while back, it looks like Amazon, AirBnB and Uber are all looking to alt-currencies like Ripple (which has seen the widest adoption so far in this space).
> But because it allows globally distributed companies like Airbnb, Amazon and Uber to move money from all their various locations to their appropriate bank accounts. Clearly, this will save time and money compared to the current modus operandi.
Source: https://oracletimes.com/does-ripple-xrp-latest-price-move-ha...
[ Also, it's somewhat shortsighted on OP's part to look at domain name registrations and come to a conclusion. Big companies like Amazon, Facebook pre-emptively register 100s of domains on combinations of their brand name and new tech solution to avoid confusion / fraud ]
If it takes consumers 22 extra steps to do something, they won't use it. I feel that's the problem with bitcoin.
The other aspect is it's ripe for a company that already does transactions to take over. Pay-pal, Visa, AMEX, etc.
I can already hear the Visa commercial tag line, "Just remember to take your Visa, because they don't take Bitcoin."
cryptographic hash functions are only as strong as the magnitude of our ignorance
or as bitcoin attempts to obfuscate it: "target=0"
it has yet to be proved, in the positive or negative, whether an algo can compute any target of a 256 bit hash in polynomial time forcing difficulty to require, at least, larger hashes or specific hardware
the problem with larger hashes is what makes the PoW difficulty where you need it also would cause the 'difficulty' of storage and reading of that hash to increase impractically
the problem with specific hardware is purely speculative but i would assume issues of frauds claiming to mine on the impeded hardware but truly use fully functioning hardware, or force the network to be centrally mined to ensure the hardware used which breaks cryptocurrency's image as decentralised
from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_is_the_maximum_di...
"The actual maximum difficulty is when current_target=0, but we would not be able to calculate the difficulty if that happened. (fortunately it never will, so we're ok.)"
that 'never' is simply offensive to the foundation of mathematical rigor that bitcoin is built on, and i would argue an attempt to defraud potential, and current, users
If what you really mean is it'll solve any problems in bqp
but you bring up an interesting point implicitly: do people who support cryptocurrencies deny the results and predictions of quantum hardware research?
Ardor's network speed, I believe is setup to do 35x faster transactions than bitcoin and 3.5x faster than ripple. Disclaimer: I own some Ardor.