The Next Level for Cryptocurrency: When Will Amazon Accept Bitcoin Payments?

Experts agree that the future of cryptocurrency will largely depend on whether it is accepted as regular payments from leading online retailers. There is reason to believe that it will.

Despite the euphoria caused by cryptocurrency in the past few months, bitcoin, ethereum, ripple and co. have not yet been accepted by the so-called real economy. Apart from some (sometimes shady) online stores and some fickle stores, cryptocurrency is not accepted as a means of payment.

This is understandable when you look at the problems that a giant like Amazon can have with cryptocurrency today. There is huge volatility. Recently there have been fluctuations of 20-30%. Therefore, the adoption of cryptocurrency will involve significant risk for retail stores. Moreover, in the era of exchange-traded bitcoin futures, hedging through the futures market would be possible. But this is associated with transaction costs, which would increase the already high price of bitcoin.

There is another very important point - transaction speed. Bitcoin, through blockchain technology, currently allows seven transactions per second. For Ethereum, this figure is approximately twice as high. Amazon reported that the maximum number of transactions last year was 600 transactions per second. Even if a small fraction of Amazon customers paid with bitcoin or ethereum (and no other bitcoin transactions occurred in the world at the time), this situation would quickly lead to unreasonable wait times.

But cryptocurrency geniuses tell us that these are just early stages of difficulties that will soon be solved. Either by improving existing currencies on the Blockchain, or through new, more efficient currencies. For example, ripple today already allows 1500 transactions per second and can meet Amazon's requirements. Experts say the question is not “will,” but “when will” large retailers accept payments in cryptocurrency. This would be a huge breakthrough. If, for example, Amazon were to accept bitcoin as a payment method, it would add value to the digital currency.

We haven't gotten very far yet, but there is clear evidence that major players are working on this problem. For example, Amazon has secured some cryptocurrency-related domains. It is reported that Starbucks will soon accept payments in cryptocurrency.

So I would like to take a look at what such a payment in bitcoin or Co would look like.. A likely method is a crypto credit card. In fact, these credit cards are available today. Three such providers can be identified: Swiss company Monaco, which recently raised $25 million through an ICO, Singapore-based TenX, which raised a total of $80 million through an ICO, and Frankfurt-based Savedroid, which is currently in the process of issuing an ICO and has already announced a crypto credit card.

Crypto credit cards can already be used for online purchases - at least in theory. However, for each transaction, their users must first convert the account amount into fiat before they can pay with it. This makes payment costly and cumbersome, meaning few people make purchases with crypto credit cards today. But this problem will go away as soon as large retailers start accepting payments in cryptocurrency. Then the starting signal will sound for this new payment method and for the acceptance of cryptocurrency in the market.

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