Most interesting for me: They estimate the fair long-term value to be around 1.300 USD - indicating no more great rises will come.
Which is it?
Maybe the media exposure would be great if Amazon accepted it directly but it wouldn't really change the utility of Bitcoin.
I think it's more accurate to say that Amazon accepting BTC would place a minimum value on BTC, assuming Amazon didn't peg the price of items in BTC to the price some other currency, for example if they offered to sell the Nexus 7 for 0.5 BTC, then 1 BTC would be worth at least USD600.
As for the value of BTC, nothing would prevent Amazon to have a fixed price in USD and a floating/real-time adjusted price in BTC (that's what merchants using BTC do anyway currently).
a) negligible (you have to scan a QR code and then copy/paste the gift card code instead of typing in your CC)
b) they pay you for it!
The moment a physical address / name are associated with a wallet, any spending from that wallet can be tracked back to you forever. If a substantial number of people are using bitcoin on Amazon, then effectively Amazon will be able to track what and where all of those people are spending their money.
Multiply this across all retailers, paycheck services, government institutions (e.g. the IRS), etc... and bitcoin effectively allows many corporations and governments to track any of your spending and (perhaps more importantly) wealth associated with bitcoin. This, I suspect, will ultimately limit bitcoin's adoption.
As for the tracking of your spending, it's already happening when you have a credit card. I don't know if Amazon know about your spending outside of their marketplace, but Mastercard, Visa and others certainly do, and I'm not sure whether they keep that data entirely private or not - Nothing would stop the government to ask them directly for your data, for example.
Admittedly, governments can already request credit card data, under court supervision (ideally... unfortunately, it seems with an exception for the NSA), but with bitcoin you are voluntarily placing this information on public record.
If you ever want to buy something with bitcoin, the retailer can immediately look up how much money you're worth (or at least that particular wallet) when you give them your wallet address. They can also immediately check if you've spent any money (and how much) with their competitors' known public wallets.
There will likely be aggregation services that will associate multiple wallets that are connected with a common address (just like modern day data collection agencies) and sell this data to retailers. Advertisers will know exactly (or at least a lower bound) of how much you're worth and where you like to spend your money.
If bitcoin gets traction, it will effectively ruin any financial privacy we have remaining. It's one thing for a government to have access to this, it's a whole other world of problems when everyone from my neighbor to my cable company has access to it.
A wallet usually had multiple addresses, and there's no reliable way to tell if two addresses are from the same person or not. So if you have funds on your public address A, and you transfer some to new address B, and later you pay with B, there's no reliable for Amazon to tell if A belongs to you or not.
They can also immediately check if you've spent any money (and how much) with their competitors' known public wallets.
That's not how it works. Companies can't just tell people to send money to their public addresses, because it'd be very hard to tell payments apart. They generate random addresses for each client, which they then transfer back to their main addresses.
But since most sites use payment processors like Coinbase, what really happens is that the processor generates their address, which the user send money to, and then they use internal accounting to send a single transfer to the retailer.
So all Amazon would know is that you spent your money with someone who uses Coinbase, but only Coinbase would know who.
- One is that Amazon can identify your wallet when you pay them for something.
My objection is that if you have multiple addresses, it's not easy at all for Amazon to know if they all belong to you or not. Of course, it doesn't work if you just create an address, transfer the payment amount to it, and then immediately transfer it to Amazon.
But if you keep a savings address and few payments wallets and maybe a web wallet (which is not really a "wallet", since it mixes your bitcoins with everyone else's), it becomes increasingly hard to tell apart.
- The second problem is that Amazon, having identified your wallet, can then see what other retailers have you bought from.
But this doesn't work, because other retailers will use payment processors, and that kind of tracking (correlating in → out) doesn't work, because payment processors don't do that. Instead, they pool all the payments and send you (the retailer) a single transfer at the end of the day/week/etc.
You mean 'bitcoin address', not wallet. A wallet can, and usually does, have many public addresses.
For this reason I don't see Bitcoin exploding based on its utility as a payment platform, at least on-line. Fiat NFC mobile payments can be made just as convenient on the high street as well.
IMHO Bitcoins success with the everyman really hinges on being a super convenient but secure alternative for casual payments.
Imagine a web agency that decided earlier this year it will pay its designers 5k USD + 10 Bitcoins a month (as a nice perk). That agency would be bankrupt by now :)
But more importantly, what matters is whether the manufacturers and distributors accept and use bitcoin amongst themselves all the way along the resource chain. If Amazon immediately turns around and converts the btc revenue to usd in order to pay for inventory, then what point is there in using btc in the first place? Right now it's a niche group of people using bitcoin to actually buy things(at their own expense at that), and without a doubt the retailer is immediately converting that revenue to usd.
I don't think you fully grasp that there is a limit in the supply of Bitcoin in the long term, and that is exactly the key differentiator vs fiat currencies printed when governments need to pay their debts, ad vitam eternam. Some people say it's because of this structure that Bitcoin will fail, but in the end that's the only reason that Bitcoin will actually thrive if it is successful.
The world GDP is somewhere around 50 Trillion Dollars ($50 x 10^12). Bitcoin is designed so that there will never be more than 21 Million in existence. Let’s say that there is a possibility that Bitcoin could one day constitute 1% of world transactions. (I could envision the percentage being much higher, or 0%, but 1% is a good place to start). If this were the case, then
($50T x 1%) / 21M BTC = $23,809.52 / BTC
(Again, this isn’t a scientific treatment of the valuation of a currency, but a back-of-the-envelope approach.)
So we could see how the price of a single Bitcoin could increase from its current value of ~ $550.00 to $23,809.52. What is the likelihood of Bitcoin succeeding in being the currency used in 1% of world transactions? Let’s say it’s 10%. (Again, exact value not important.) You get a risk-adjusted value of $2,3809.52.