Does anyone with knowledge of e-retail industry and BTC acceptance know how do business deal with the wild fluctuations in the BTC price?
You, the merchant, can accept bitcoin (and other currencies) using Bitpay's payment system. Bitpay immediately credits your account with USD. No risk of long-term (more than a few seconds) price moves in BTCUSD.
The downside is that Bitpay, like every other authorized cryptocurrency "bank", is crippled by KYC/AML regulations and cannot process all the applications they receive for new customers.
You need liquidity to process payments on a non trivial scale, but that's par for the game for banks, credit cards companies, paypal, and everyone else in this space.
Waiting for a confirmation will do you no good anyway. No exchange accepts any less than six, which would have you take the exchange risk for over an hour. That's not a very good business case.
If you look at OTC trades on distributed exchanges, you will see that this strategy takes place there too. Make a trade, and finalize only if the exchange rate moves in that favor, otherwise cancel. Most places have reputation systems in place to suppress that behavior but they have their own problems. There's likely no ideal solution.
(Also do note that one confirmation is likely not enough anyway if you want to avoid rolled back transactions. Orphan blocks aren't really that uncommon.)
It's too late for GOG to take back its game, I've already downloaded it in the five minutes it took you to realize I've rescinded my payment.
Payments on the globally replicated blockchain can not be both quick and secure. Many soda machine experiments faced this exact problem. What all of them did in practice was the same thing as all restaurants and pubs do, eat the risk. Any guest who wanted to leave without paying, or pirate your game, would do exactly that anyway and not bother with faking payments in the first place. Every pub and café owner takes the exact same risk even when settling in cash. People leave without paying all the time.
The specific example of game keys you mentioned has some interesting aspects to it however! Trustless zero knowledge swaps have been demonstrated between them and Bitcoins, which could open for some exciting business ideas that were not possible before.
Since all the small transactions are happening via these tokens, the cost of Bitcoin transactions would be a much smaller issue..
However, still things require an additional layer to get it to work in the physical world.
Lets not forget that this technology only became 'accepted' by the mainstream in 2017.
Before that, it was nerds volunteering to program various infrastructure.
Also, between accounting, finance, and taxes, implementing cryptocurrency for any fortune 500 company will add additional layers of complexity.
Yes, that risk is increased quite a bit, but I thought the main selling point of Bitcoin is that govt can't control your spending, which would stay
It's a good one thats already been implemented behind the scenes.
For example, transaction costs are too high to reasonably pay for a single cup of coffee. But if you know you buy a cup of coffee on a roughly daily basis, you could put down $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, get an anonymous gift card for that amount of money, and then use that over time to pay for individual coffees.
But that really raises two questions: why do you feel the need to use a semi-anonymous, public-ledger currency to pay for coffee at a shop where your status as a regular makes you recognizable, and why is it worth foregoing interest plus the risk of not using the entire gift card for the privilege?
On the other hand, Litecoin, RaiBlocks and Ripple could be used for payments and many companies seems to have started.
http://fortune.com/2018/01/10/microsoft-bitcoin-temporary-ha...
Is it ridiculous that the price can fluctuate enough in 60 minutes to significantly affect a transaction? Obviously.
There are 1000 other cryptos that can move money.
Bitcoin is the only reliable way to hedge money against massive government inflation that we have seen after an African Coup or hyperinflation.