Over this year, an increasing number of people have leapt to be part in bitcoin’s meteoric rise.
There is plenty of money at stake and bitcoiners’ livelihoods and savings are on the line. As a mere investment mean, bitcoin itself has a string of problems. It’s highly volatile — accounting for drops as deep as 30% in a trade day, funds are hard to recover if hacked, and bitcoin’s technology has been overtake other newer cryptocurrencies which offer better performance in terms of programmability, greater anonymity and scaling.
Most people in the cryptoworld tend to point at popular and promising altcoins when they consider about what may dethrone the current cryptocurrency success story... But the real threat might come from a more material and tangible realm...
As we know, Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world with over 94 billion USD turnover last year, it accounts for nearly half of all American online sales and has operations in 5 European countries, Australia, India, Brazil, Mexico... But offeringin spit of offering a large variety of payment methods, the online retailer has yet to allow customers to pay with bitcoin or any other cryptocoin.
Any cryptocurrency that Amazon adopted would inmediatly skyrocket. Given the present popularity of cryptocurrencies, what is Amazon waiting for to jump into the crypto arena?
Probably the main reason Amazon may not be adodpting crypto payments is their limited transaction speeds. Let´s have a look at the top two cryptocurrencies by marketcap.
bitcoin: 7 transactions per second
ethereum: 15 transactions per second
Amazon scored at 600 transactions/second during last year’s Amazon prime sale. probably higher in this present year. If only a fraction of Amazon users decided to pay with cryptos, they would be stuck for hours waiting for transactions to be accepted in he blockchain. Not an ideal customer experience for Amazon, considering is branding speed and comfort as its flagship.
Does it mean Amazon will avoid cryptocurrencies due to slow transactions? Bitcoin and ethereum are too slow to support Amazon’s needs but other cryptocurrencies are in line to cope with speed at confirming transactions. An alternative crypto is making wornders in this field: Ripple has test proof speeds as high as 1500 transactions/sec.
What May Happen
There are a few exits on Amazon stance on cryptos that could endanger bitcoin’s todays reign:
Amazon might remain out of the cryptocurrency arena.
In order to swift from investment to currency, bitcoin needs to gain major adoption from retailers and merchants. It’s not likely that Amazon will be out of this sector for much longer but if it did BTC would suffer from it as the number 1 crypto currency after all the hype created along the last couple of years would not be capable of meeting the demand of the number 1 online retail. This wouldn’t kill bitcoin, but it would minimized its potential as a online currency.Amazon could partner up with a bitcoin competitor
This seems feasable if bitcoin can´t keep up with Amazon’s demand for transaction speeds. Ripple as commented is a best contender with over 1000+ TPS. This outcome could definitely endanger bitcoin’s top position as the most reputable crypto. Let´s consider that a fictional deal with Visa raised Monaco cryptocurrency value nearly 700%. Any tangible deal with Amazon will surge tot he roof the partner cryptocurrency of choice.Amazon could develop its own cryptocoin
Amazon likes to control it´s supply chain, also other resurces as Prime video is any indication — Amazon loves to play high where it can leverage its massive army of developers to make big irruption in any field. Its done so in cloud storage, video streaming, hardware offerings....you name it, so If amazon sees potential and the future in the cryptocurrency universe it certainly has the technical and finantial capability to break into it.
really i think its not a threat but a advantage if it goes crypto more uses is good!
thanks for your comment @harj it will be a big positive influence into the crypto adoption...but it will seriously jeopardize Bitcoin itself if it´s not Amazon choice...
if they want to start amazoncoin let them darega, I will buy some asap! if you want to follow me I will follow you too. : ) Harj
@harj I woukd buy as well in fact it would be a premium coin raight away. Besides there are rumours Telegram messaging app will be developing their own crypto coin...I will buy that one as well
I wonder if anyone at AWS thinks about having those millions of machines mine.
@egmracer01 you are right but I guess the rather keep all their computational power in serving their network...should Amazon started to crash would be a huge damagw to their brand...
The way AWS is built up, they always have extra capacity because they have to be able to handle peak loads. The have the number of machines to handle times like cyber Monday and actually host netflix as well. I'm sure they could spare a few machines on low load times.
If something like the Raiden network were implemented surely amazon would adopt it or imitate the technology. It's so crazy to think about the biggest companies getting involved in this space, even through I am sure it will eventually happen.
@eoincurran What is Raiden, is it related to Raiblocks? If Amazon storms into cryptos...the space will be booming!
From what I know it is a secondary network that would run on top of Ethereum. I forget the exact numbers but it would make something in the ballpark of 50,000 transactions a second a breeze. (Similar to the Visa/Mastercard network speeds today.)
that would be a major achievement for the blockchain/smart contract technology!