Amazon denies report of accepting Bitcoin as payment
reuters.com
reuters.com
As an active international company, Amazon is perfectly positioned to create its own virtual coin. They've created their own transportation service since what is available did not meet their needs. Likewise, the credit card companies take a big chunk of their profits and don't meet all their needs. It's only a matter of time before they go after them. I bet they're making plans to create it and use it for internal transactions aiming for it to be used by all the shoppers. Eventually it will be convertible to any currency and Bitcoin will be one of them. This is the power of being big and getting bigger.
This is a multi year project but it's coming.
If you mean they will try to move away from USD (or other national currencies), there is absolutely zero incentive for them to do so. And how will they pay their wholesalers, vendors, employees, taxes?
If they allow that with USD et al, they're more liable in more "currently on the books" ways than if they started letting people send Ama-coin across the globe.
And that was when the FTC wasn't chaired by Lisa Khan.
In contrast, "use this coin to buy anything on Amazon" is a massive product from the second it launches.
I doubt sellers would say no to a sale if a client offered to purchase it with a blockchain store card.
I still don't see a big upside for Amazon, but merchants wouldn't need to accept it. And of course, Amazon could incentivize merchants to use it. Maybe if you take it, you get 1% more value than if you take USD and spend it on the site/AWS.
Imagine if the dollar fluctuated widely (say because of inflation) but BezosBucks does not. Your buying power stays the same (while BezosBucks becomes more expensive to buy into over time).
If they send me 101 Bezobucks instead, I'm happy because they gave me $101 of value; they're happy because for that $101 purchase, they got $100 value; if I paid with a rewards credit card, they would probably get $98-$99.
Why it would need to be a cryptocoin thing instead of just a gift card/credit, I don't know. Cryptocoins are hot for reasons that don't resonate with me. Maybe some way around gift card laws, and if they can back into foreign remittances without needing a money transmital license, it could be useful.
But I’m genuinely curious, why is this a massive product for anything more than a weird form of money laundering?
Among a few.
There is widespread manipulation in the crypo market. The difference with crypto is that there are no regulations that even attempt to hinder it.
https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-join-a-crypto-pump-and-dum...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lbzdn7/scam...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-a-pump-and-du...
> Unpredictable issuance.
Perhaps in theory, but USD has proven to be a far less volatile store of value than Bitcoin and Etherium, which have both been through the equivalent of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation over the past decade.
> Subject to censorship.
Currency is not subject to censorship, such a thing would be impossible. Certain payment providers have refused to process payments to various individuals, but such a thing would be possible in the crypto space as well.
If by less volatile you mean gradually losing value, I mean yeah.. But is that a better store of value?
> such a thing would be possible in the crypto space as well.
Nope, that is literally impossible with Bitcoin. Hitler could open up a shop, and no one could stop him from receiving payments.
USD is a horrible value storage in the last year's if you deal outside of USD
They are owned by someone who doesn't understand how one thing can be "good" without another thing in the same category being "bad".
- Other payment systems like PayPal/Venmo/Zelle are for P2P domestic use only - you can't send money cross-borders.
- Paypal/Venmo requires you to have a bank account. Diem doesn't, and so part of Diem's mission is to serve the un-banked.
- This is a little pedantic, but PayPal/Venmo/Zelle/Square Cash are closed ecosystems. You can't send money from one to the other, for example. Diem is a protocol that you can interact with using any wallet, not just Novi.
Not being paid to post this or anything. I just think Diem is not well advertised haha
I think the problem with Diem is not that it doesn't fill a market role, it's that the target market, in general, knows how evil Facebook is, and would prefer a "cleaner" alternative. The problem with doing dodgey stuff with user data for years and years is that you gain a reputation, and then even if a small subset of your massive super organization makes a really good pure product, that product still inherits the stench from the parent. We don't trust the Zuck, and until fairly recently the target market for Diem were almost entirely people tech savvy enough to understand the depths to which Facebook operates in.
Imagine if Google came out with a new crypto-coin, and with all the soul and creativity a bloated bureaucracy can muster, called it "GCoin", a "New way to shop and get tracked!". Now, many normal people would stay away from GCoin purely because they know it would be in the GGraveyard in two years, but the rest of the target market would think," Ya know, Google has been absolutely evil this last decade or so, building their business model around surveiling us and toying with our emotions to get us to buy useless shit, while slowly trading away any uniqueness they ever had for fun primary marketing colors in a thousand different patterns. I think I'll pass on this GCoin bullshit...". That's how we feel about Diem. Except possibly not quite as angry, because at least Facebook has given us a figurehead to hate, instead of the faceless, souless, primary colored evil that is Google.
Now think about a currency that's used internally and slowly it gets released by the company and used by all. By the time people started fighting against it it would be too late to stop.
You really think facebook employees using it internally would mean other people would accept it too?
I don’t see anything going good, PR wise, with those three in one team
Like a stable coin?
idk why you think it needs to come down to this, like its a big stance. They sell stuff. They will take whatever form of payment you want to accomplish this just like multiple fiat currencies are accepted by companies. If they accepted bitcoin it would be a casual add on of a payment type.
So what? They don't have to keep it in Bitcoin.
It makes lots of sense as they would safe millions on fees if done right.
> Amazon is perfectly positioned to create its own virtual coin
They could, and there's even a big change they would. We've seen big companies do dumb stuff. e.g. FB Libra project.
Maybe elsewhere tho…like South America or Africa
Argentina has had over 30% inflation EACH YEAR for many years in a row, for instance
They are actually at the forefront of adoption of The Lightning Network.
If you dollar cost average Bitcoin, it has outperformed the usd and will very likely continue to do so in the future.
So what? They are big enough to create the correct incentives to change that.
Everyone will benefit, but specially them.
The executive team at the time was made visibly uncomfortable by the idea while it was being presented. They expressed concern over the process involved in handling fraud and essentially said the business model didn't support a Bitcoin-based payments system. They even had the nerve to inquire about how accepting payments in Bitcoin benefits the customer.
Needless to say, the team did not win. In fact, my team did - but we probably shouldn't have.
Then the Amazon Coin [0] came out later that year, which to this day very few people actually are aware even exists.
It makes 0 sense only if you assume that they will hodl the coins, which makes no sense if you're using it exclusively to settle a transaction.
You don't need to be expose to the crypto volatility to accept it as a payment method, in fact I don't see any risk involved as long as you find a way to immediately convert your crypto to the fiat currency of your choice.
Which by definition would be centralised, and so wouldn't need a blockchain at all?
Will Amazon accept Bitcoin for payment before the end of the year, as rumored? No. Does Amazon hate cryptocurrency and think it's a scam? Also no. Will Amazon accept some form of cryptocurrency as payment at some point in the future? Given this statement, possibly yes.
It shouldn't though, as most of them live in first world countries and have never experienced the calamities of hyper inflation and wealth seizure by the government.
yes, they're used to monetary stability
unless they've used Bitcoin
>crypto is worth at least twice as much
of the currency that lost value? do you see the irony here?
Fiat is just a convenient unit of account, that serves the purpose of contrast.
How'd you fuck that up the market has been shooting up every week?
Isn't it possible to think BTC is a scam while believing other cryptocurrencies are not a scam?
That is, a more centralized crypto that Amazon controls. Or at least one that has a known and stable conversion rate set by some entity (which could be Amazon) to other goods.
Regardless of their opinion as to "think cryptocurrency is a scam" they can make money selling CPU cycles to people who have bought into the cryptocurrency thing. Bonus if the cloud provider can offer "managed blockchain" flavour rather than "here's some vanilla infrastructure, you can run your blockchain stuff on that, just as well as you can on your laptop."
It's the old "Selling pickaxes during a gold rush" plan. You don't actually have to worry so much as to if there's really gold to be found. Just if the miners buying pickaxes think that there is.
My hunch is that they could be building an NFT marketplace. It makes sense.
Seriously though, it's easy to verify if a NFT is genuine - one of the features of Blockchain tech.
You can check that a token exists on chain, but that tells you nothing about whether the person who issued the token owns the copyright to the work. Ie, no guarantees of authenticity.
I currently have no reason to want to own an NFT, and never "buy" content from amazon because it is locked to my account and has no real permanence.
This would certainly be a killer app for NFTs, but I doubt Amazon is willing to cede enough control to actually do this.
Portable digital assets could be priced higher and would have more demand.
> still have the same hosting costs
Do content owners have to pay amazon hosting costs? I thought that was included in their platform fee.
> dramatically increase the odds of a compromise leaking their material permanently
The odds of leak are 100% already, so this isn't true.
NFTs don’t help with storage because blockchains are both inefficient and global so you still need to pay someone to host the actual media files and only give them to people with valid keys.
Worse from a rights-holder’s perspective, blockchains don’t allow you to remove content. That means that any time something gets compromised, you have valid keys floating around with no way to remove them. It’s true that leaks happen anyway but there are some key differences: these are always the best quality and they look like legitimate usage so it’s harder to block or track the way they go after torrent users. Anything which reduces risk will increase the number of people bootlegging by a hefty margin.
You can do things like, say, having the key in the blockchain be what you use to request a temporary key with lots of rate-limiting but if you’re building the infrastructure for a separate login and distribution system anyway, it comes back to the question of what benefit you get from the extra cost and risk of using NFTs rather than just using that system. If the answer isn’t “a lot more money”, nobody is going to jump on a system which is less reliable and harder to use.
Those first few years kissing the asses of IP conglomerates enough to get them to try it will be horrible, and then when you prove success competition will be fierce as there is no moat: not a business I would want to start. But I'd certainly be a customer.
All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone, but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.
Bitcoin and a handful of others use SHA256.
That said, if that happened, think about what would happen next: there’d be a mass exodus of customers and breach of contract lawsuits, governments would bring charges under anti-hacking laws, and the rest of the community would agree to rewrite history back to the point before that happened. He’d lose orders of magnitude more money than he could possibly gain, especially given Bitcoin’s limited liquidity.
That last part is key: we have no reason to think Bezos is a crook, or willing to break his customer’s trust, but say he has been completely compromised by Dr. Evil. This still makes no sense because nobody _wants_ a bunch of random hashes — they want to buy things. Even if he could commit the theft of the century, there wouldn’t be any place to spend it with enough volume to make it worth as much as Bezos makes every second.
Now think carefully about the implications of doing that to steal money. It’s not like they’re hypothetically doing that to hot fix a critical security issue - it’d literally be to profit from betraying their customers’ trust!
The speculative nature of accepting Bitcoin or another crypto is all well and good, but I can’t see shareholders super stoked to see the less profitable side of the business accepting money this way. If Amazon wanted to speculate on BTC, it could buy it same as any other entity.
Sure, if Amazon had its own coin, that would be interesting, but not only would that face the same scrutiny that Facebook's Libre faced (possibly even worse, given Amazon is the third or fourth richest company), for Amazon users, there is no clear incentive to use an Amazon coin versus a normal credit card or whatever local payment systems Amazon might use. Speaking as a consumer, I really don’t care about what payment method is most profitable for any of the places I shop. In fact, I almost exclusively use American Express, which has the highest transaction fees (obv. I have a Mastercard and a Visa for certain countries), because it also gives me the most value/best protection/rewards I enjoy. Hell, I have an Amazon American Express card that gives me 5% back on all Amazon purchases — so any Amazon coin or other crypto would have to offer me a better return.
I get the appeal in areas where Amazon isn’t as dominant as it is, in say, the US. But even then, I would think more basic logistical issues relate to storing and delivering goods would be higher priority than a payment method that has lower transaction fees.
I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be that on eBay it was a nightmare to do a similar thing with foreign currencies. You'd have a foreign transaction fee and an additional currency conversion fee.
Some people complained additionally that when you received a refund it was received in the seller's currency so you had to pay again to have it converted back to the original currency.
2. not having to worry about chargebacks
If you bought Bitcoin for a buck a decade ago and bought a GPU for Christmas and decided on New Year's Day you'd like to return it, but Bitcoin changed price you'd have to deal with a lot of tax stuff. There's no payment processor that can resolve this.
First, the B Word conference also helped prop up the price of Bitcoin recently.
There was also a lot of bullish “on-chain” metrics lately - more new people holding Bitcoin longer, etc. a few on Bitcoin have been predicting a bit of a supply shock for the last couple weeks
Anyway… I also think it’s totally silly of an idea that Amazon would accept Bitcoin payments now. Tesla just backed out of doing so.
Very few in the US have much interest in using BTC outside as a store of value. Many other countries in South America and Africa will adopt Bitcoin for more legit reasons before big companies in the US hop on board IMO…those areas have way messier of monetary systems and serve as actual better use cases for Bitcoin
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1644513/digital-currency-and...
"Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead" on the "Payments Acceptance and Customer Experience" team... that doesn't seem like much of a joke to me.
> "The Payments Acceptance & Experience team is seeking an experienced product leader to develop Amazon’s Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy and product roadmap. You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed, drive overall vision and product strategy, and gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities. "
That sounds like bitcoin.
Also: https://twitter.com/CryptoCobain/status/1419776583531892737