Last month, an Amazon executive confirmed that the online retail juggernaut would not be accepting bitcoin because it did not see enough demand. The company did launch its own Amazon Coins virtual currency.
One bitcoin expert thinks Amazon will eventually allow its customers to pay for their goods in the peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency. Once Amazon accepts bitcoins, which he says will be by the end of the year, then a wide variety of other companies will follow suit.
Speaking in an interview with Russia Today, Roger Ver, a Bitcoin evangelist and entrepreneur, argued that the low-cost transactions will make it a lot more attractive for companies. He added that businesses could very well offer discounts for paying in bitcoin rather than credit cards.
“Luckily, we have all sorts of tools to deal with those sort of things, there are all sorts of online escrows […] basically any time you pay to a company which you trust, let’s take Amazon.com for example – if you pay with a credit card, the credit card company is going to charge you around a three per cent fee. If you pay with bitcoin there is basically no fee,” said Ver.
“So, maybe they will offer a one percent discount, all the people that are paying in bitcoin will save this one percent discount, and Amazon will save one or two percent off from the credit card processing fees. And everybody is happy.”
Although there would be widespread adoption of bitcoin, Ver doesn’t think credit cards will become eviscerated entirely, though bitcoins will be the major player for online payments. He also hopes that bitcoin will replace national currencies, but it really depends on the fiscal policies of governments.
“But if governments continue to just print money like crazy, devaluing the currencies all around the world, people are figuring it out real quick – with bitcoin that sort of thing can’t happen and people are going to just flood to want to use bitcoin instead of dollars or euros or yen.”
If the government decides to limit its money supply then there would be no need for bitcoin to take over United States dollars, British pound sterling, euros or Chinese renminbi yuan.