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Bitcoin Businesses The Almighty Buck

Amazon's Hiring a 'Digital Currency and Blockchain' Lead, Confirms Interest in 'Modern' Payments (cnbc.com) 59

"Amazon is looking to add a digital currency and blockchain expert to its payments team," reports CNBC. According to a recent job posting, Amazon's payments acceptance and experience team is seeking to hire 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," according to the job posting, which was previously reported by Insider... An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement: "We're inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon.

"We believe the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments, and hope to bring that future to Amazon customers as soon as possible.

UPDATE (7/26): While CNBC speculated the move meant that Amazon "could be taking a more serious look at cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin," Reuters reported the next day that Amazon had "denied a media report saying the e-commerce giant was looking to accept bitcoin payments by the end of the year."

But reports like CNBC's nonetheless caused a 17% spike in the price of Bitcoin, according to Bloomberg, which briefly boosted its price back above $40,000 (before dropping back down to $38,000...)
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Amazon's Hiring a 'Digital Currency and Blockchain' Lead, Confirms Interest in 'Modern' Payments

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  • The Visa Tax (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @03:49PM (#61619413) Homepage Journal

    Amazon, like pretty much everyone else, wants to avoid paying the Visa tax.

    • Considering that they are the biggest online marketplace in the world, there is a legit case to consider here. What if they offer their own currency for use exclusively on Amazon and Amazon services? The same points you can buy shit with on Amazon, you can gift to streamers on Twitch, you can use on AWS, you can pay to buy crap in the new Amazon MMO with...
      When are virtual points considered an alternative currency and start being subject to different laws?

      • Considering that they are the biggest online marketplace in the world, there is a legit case to consider here. What if they offer their own currency for use exclusively on Amazon and Amazon services? The same points you can buy shit with on Amazon, you can gift to streamers on Twitch, you can use on AWS, you can pay to buy crap in the new Amazon MMO with... When are virtual points considered an alternative currency and start being subject to different laws?

        ... and then Amazon becomes Buy n Large [wikipedia.org]

      • by leonbev ( 111395 )

        On the bright side, all Amazon Prime members will probably get $50 worth of ZonBucks for "free" to start trying to pay for things with them.

      • Perfect for the company towns they're building.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Considering that they are the biggest online marketplace in the world, there is a legit case to consider here. What if they offer their own currency for use exclusively on Amazon and Amazon services? The same points you can buy shit with on Amazon, you can gift to streamers on Twitch, you can use on AWS, you can pay to buy crap in the new Amazon MMO with...
        When are virtual points considered an alternative currency and start being subject to different laws?

        It already exists [amazon.com]. You can buy virtual Amazon curren

    • I don't use a credit card online for the convenience alone, as an American I use it because I can dispute transactions. Not sure how the rest of the world does it do I think most of it can too. One thing I will never do is give Amazon direct access to an account that has real money in it.
      • And, as reported yesterday, these people want a key to my apartment building...

      • by bwt ( 68845 )

        Cryptocurrencies will solve for the problem of disputes by using smart contracts. You will essentially pay into an escrow. If you are happy with the item, you tell the contract and it completes payment. If you are not, the a dispute protocol is initiated that can eventually give you your money back if you prevail and complete a timely return.

    • So, they're replacing it with the super cheap crypto tax? A single BTC transaction is, what, $50 right now?

      • Bitcoin transaction fees are paid to the miners that verify the transaction. Who does Amazon know that has a large amount of computing power that could give them favorable rates? i.e. Amazon will flood the system with verification resources since they would be paying the fees to themselves.

        This is similar to how Amazon-branded credit has a 5% "reward": a portion of a credit transaction fee go to the brand-owner, which Amazon is paying to itself.

        • Does it really matter if Amazon mines transaction blocks themselves though? The cost for these are associated with mining difficulty and energy costs; if anything, Amazon dedicating AWS resources to this would make prices go up.

          The other problem is that the Bitcoin network is horribly slow at validating transaction. If this story happens to be true, Amazon would most likely not be doing it just to give Visa the shaft, which is still an incredibly cheap way to process purchases.

          • Amazon compute resources at scale could beat the costs of any operator that isn't stealing electricity, and they have chip design resources that could beat anyone currently making mining ASICs. They'd be completely vertically integrated and could subsidize any part of the stack if they found it useful.

            OTOH, I agree with your point about Visa transactions. It's still a practical way to handle money.

            • It's not so much the hardware/power cost (which, keep in mind, is still bananas for Bitcoin mining). The mere fact of having an entity like Amazon entering the mining business would make costs skyrocket, because Bitcoin mining difficulty automatically adjusts based on the entire network's hashrate.

              Most cryptocurrencies do this, as far as i know.

      • It's about $2 right now. It is a lot more volatile than credit card fees, but is generally much, much, much lower than $50.

        https://ycharts.com/indicators... [ycharts.com]

        That said, BTC is not the whole of cryptocurrency, or blockchain, or anything else.

        If any coin really does get accepted by say PayPal, Amazon, and Tesla, I'd bet it's actually DOGE. DOGE's fee is something like $0.25 right now.

        Much lower transaction fees, much lower energy usage, and the constantly growing supply is arguably good for retailers, as it may

        • (You know what else has a constantly growing supply? Dollars.)

          It also has monetary policies. Good or bad, but policies which can be controlled.

          There's good reason why the only one pushing a joke "currency" such as Doge is Elon Musk.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    On Monday April 26, 2021 @02:16AM UTC, Pyrite Pete[1] had said: [slashdot.org]

    Wait 1-2 months, and BTC will be twice its value.

    That was back when bitcoin had already fallen, and down to about $47K at the time. Over two months ago. It is now sitting at about $34K (and it's struggled to get back to/maintain 40K).

    Now that's what I call a prediction #FAIL!

    [1] no, not that Pyrite Pete [slashdot.org] - the one [imgflip.com] that always posts as AC.

    • Prices are always volatile in a new, expanding market
    • Never trust a man whose name is "Pyrite." That's fools gold for a pirate.

  • Certainly plenty here with clap like a bunch of baby seals with TBIs — and I definitely agree: It’s high time Amazon hired a moron software engineer with Dunning-Kruger to handle a pointless and nonsensical thing. Doing so for $50k and no bathroom breaks will be tricky, but I have faith in Bezos.
    • I would be surprised if Amazon had any specific interest in bitcoin, since it has worked out to be more of a commodity than a currency, having high transaction costs. Even its most ardent supporters are speculating on it, not using it to buy things.
      • Indeed. BTC is simply unfeasible for the volume of transactions Amazon operates, on the US alone.

        • Bitcoin can handle millions of transactions a second today with a lightning wallet , This is what the country of El Salvador is doing when they just made bitcoin legal tender
          • Hint: no one gives a shit about lightning.

            If the only way to a scalable payment system for BTC is to build abstraction layers on top of it, then you're actually worse than just using Visa.

      • I pay a fraction of a penny and get an instant confirmation when I send bitcoin. I spend my bitcoin almost daily as well and it saves me money doing so.
  • I assume they think allowing crypto paymen will earn them more money than it costs to support. Not necessarily any perception it will grow huge, just big enough.

  • by Ultimer ( 8105522 )
    I read an article that Amazon refused to accept Bitcoin as a method of payment, but the Amazon team said that they were working towards digital progress. I'm glad that they actually may accept Bitcoin because many people want to have a variety of options for spending Bitcoins raised on Quantum Code Canada [quantum-code.org], and I'm not the exception.
  • Unfortunately, this turned out to be untrue. I have already read several news articles that refuted this information. Perhaps fortunately, bitcoin has grown. I found out about this when I decided to look at the cryptocurrency exchange rate on the fxcess.com [fxcess.com] website. It was even to my advantage. By the way, if someone is interested in this topic, I advise you to visit the site and read more.

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