[HN Gopher] Amazon denies report of accepting Bitcoin as payment
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Amazon denies report of accepting Bitcoin as payment
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-07-26 22:00 UTC (59 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Amazon denies report of _considering_ accepting Bitcoin as
| payment.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| The first thing that came to mind when hearing they were looking
| for a blockchain lead was they were hiring for an AWS service.
| Why would a company that operates famously on thin margins (not
| the AWS side of things) accept a "currency" that could take a 7%
| price swing in a day.
| xwdv wrote:
| For speculation.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Wouldn't they be able to do that without integrating Bitcoin
| as a payment gateway?
| anyfoo wrote:
| Yeah. If they were interested in speculating using Bitcoin,
| they would just buy Bitcoin, instead of essentially letting
| their end customers decide, wouldn't they?
| hhmc wrote:
| Unless you pull the tesla trick of accepting payment in
| BTC but reserving the right to refund in either BTC or
| USD -- granting yourself a soft option on BTCUSD. Altough
| surely not worth the effort unless you have a lot of
| refund flow.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| you know you can do much more with blockchain tech than just
| payments?
|
| My hunch is that they could be building an NFT marketplace. It
| makes sense.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Does it really make sense? NFTs have not been proven to be
| anything except hype.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| If they're getting into NFT it's to sell shovels to the
| speculators.
| throwslackforce wrote:
| If more than 51% of BTC mining eventually takes place on
| machines rented from AWS, could Bezos flip a switch and take
| control of the blockchain (e.g. by shutting down the miners
| running on the AWS hardware, and rebooting it all with miners
| he controls?)
| acdha wrote:
| Nobody is legally mining on AWS - the margins would put you
| behind everyone with dedicated hardware, not to mention the
| lack of ASICs.
|
| That said, if that happened, think about what would happen
| next: there'd be a mass exodus of customers and breach of
| contract lawsuits, governments would bring charges under
| anti-hacking laws, and the rest of the community would agree
| to rewrite history back to the point before that happened.
| He'd lose orders of magnitude more money than he could
| possibly gain, especially given Bitcoin's limited liquidity.
| everfree wrote:
| AWS does not rent out bitcoin mining rigs and really has no
| incentive to. It requires expensive, extremely specialized
| single-purpose hardware that can only be used for bitcoin
| mining and can't be re-used for anything else.
| orf wrote:
| No.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| I doubt they're getting into mining, their AWS product is in
| hosted ledgers and things like that:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/
| graeme wrote:
| Not without destroying trust in AWS
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Yeah, the idea that Jeff Bezos is going to pull an exit
| scam on the entire bitcoin ecosystem is ridiculous. He
| already has all the money.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 51% miners have limited control over blockchain. They can
| censor blockchain by not allowing some transactions (and
| forking whenever other miner tries to add those transactons).
| They can undo some transactions by making a fork before that
| transaction has happened and eventually forcing the world to
| switch to their chain.
|
| All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will
| happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But
| I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
|
| Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or
| CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin
| mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose
| their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone,
| but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine
| bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin
| to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
|
| The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US
| government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some
| fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a
| lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| AWS's QLDB and Managed Blockchain have been in GA since 2019:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-managed-blockcha...
| dadoge wrote:
| What a silly episode.
|
| First, the B Word conference also helped prop up the price of
| Bitcoin recently.
|
| There was also a lot of bullish "on-chain" metrics lately - more
| new people holding Bitcoin longer, etc. a few on Bitcoin have
| been predicting a bit of a supply shock for the last couple weeks
|
| Anyway... I also think it's totally silly of an idea that Amazon
| would accept Bitcoin payments now. Tesla just backed out of doing
| so.
|
| Very few in the US have much interest in using BTC outside as a
| store of value. Many other countries in South America and Africa
| will adopt Bitcoin for more legit reasons before big companies in
| the US hop on board IMO...those areas have way messier of
| monetary systems and serve as actual better use cases for Bitcoin
| endisneigh wrote:
| Sounds like a nightmare - if Amazon did accept BTC, if you
| purchased something in BTC would Amazon send you a 1040 at the
| end of the year for capital gains? If you made returns you could
| see capital losses? Would they be obligated to send you BTC or
| the denominated fiat in USD (or whatever currency) at the time of
| purchase. If they can choose then obviously they're going to
| choose such that it's in their advantage.
|
| I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be that on
| eBay it was a nightmare to do a similar thing with foreign
| currencies. You'd have a foreign transaction fee and an
| additional currency conversion fee.
|
| Some people complained additionally that when you received a
| refund it was received in the seller's currency so you had to pay
| _again_ to have it converted back to the original currency.
| wmf wrote:
| Bitcoin is bad but all of those were solved years ago by
| BitPay.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Don't understand your response - I didn't say these things
| were problems. It's more of a matter of what Amazon will
| decide to do. Even with Bitpay the questions would still
| stand.
| sdan wrote:
| What's funny is that this rumor started as a joke on Twitter, was
| picked up by some UK newspaper (iirc) and then spread through the
| media
| brighton36 wrote:
| The messages people want to hear, are typically the most
| mimetic. It is funny though.
| thedangler wrote:
| tinfoil hat. I think it was a false news plant to cover the pump
| and dump that happened today to cover other obligation by some
| big players.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised. BTC rose from 32k to 38k in a matter
| of hours yesterday and it's already dumping. Only found out why
| hours ago, not sure if this news came before or after...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Oh, that's quite the Bart chart.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Huh, didn't know about this. Nice.
| jack_herer wrote:
| do I need an account to login?
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| On the other hand they look into it: "We remain focused on
| exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on
| Amazon."
| tobltobs wrote:
| Could you translate this to plain English for people who do not
| understand Crypto Hopium?
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| "This is good for Bitcoin"
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. Did I do anything wrong? My
| interpretation of what their statement means is that they
| don't plan to allow bitcoin payments but they anyway try to
| do tests with it internally.
| SahAssar wrote:
| That's just marketing speak for saying they don't want to say
| anything.
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