
Amazon is the biggest threat to Bitcoin right now - deegles
https://hackernoon.com/amazon-is-the-biggest-threat-to-bitcoin-right-now-62a56d8435e4
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chis
Why would an ordinary consumer ever want to pay for retail goods in a currency
other than the one that their salary comes in? Amazon is happy to eat credit
card fees, and if they really wanted to avoid that they could let customers
link their bank account directly to Amazon.

~~~
justboxing
> Why would an ordinary consumer ever want to pay for retail goods in a
> currency other than the one that their salary comes in?

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.

~~~
hkmurakami
Honest question -- how do you buy crypto with cash?

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.

~~~
justboxing
> how do you buy crypto with 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...](https://blog.kraken.com/post/1399/degraded-service-upgrade-next-
week/)

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.

~~~
hndamien
Local bitcoins allows you to use cash from your wallet.

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prepend
This article is pretty light on content and doesn’t answer the question of why
Amazon would want to adopt cryptocurrency.

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.

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justboxing
Yes, Amazon is considering Cryptocurrency but not Bitcoin.

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...](https://oracletimes.com/does-ripple-xrp-latest-price-move-have-
anything-to-do-with-airbnb-amazon-and-uber/)

[ 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 ]

~~~
amalag
Agree with you on Ripple's potential but I wouldn't read too much into that
slide. Those companies were on the slide as an example use case. I don't think
it meant any official buy in.

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bb88
I disagree.

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."

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twelve40
Bandwidth or not, how can you pay for retail junk with something that may go
up 2x in value in the next few hours? Or down by as much.

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maremmano
When (not if) will the Primecoins arrive?

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justifier
math is the biggest threat to bitcoin

cryptographic hash functions are only as strong as the magnitude of our
ignorance

~~~
andirk
Can't argue against you there, but isn't the point of Proof of Work that it
grows as our ignorance (inverse of hashing power) diminishes?; The smarter we
get, the more difficult it gets.

~~~
justifier
sure, but at some point you run out of leading zeros

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...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_is_the_maximum_difficulty.3F)

"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

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gremlinsinc
Amazon needs to adopt Ardor with it's own child chain.

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.

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KasianFranks
It's not about Bitcoin, it's about Cryptocurrency. Amazon is being forced
(disrupted before our own eyes) into this new economic model.

~~~
watty
The point is that Bitcoin doesn't scale well enough for Amazon. If Amazon
chooses a lesser known cryptocurrency or creates their own, Bitcoin will
suffer.

