People really want Amazon to get into cryptocurrency. Amazon-watchers have shivered with anticipation as the company bought web domains like amazonbitcoin. But a new wave of purchases has observers keyed up all over again. This time the acquired URLs are amazonethereum. The easy answer is brand protection. Amazon can certainly afford to collect as many potentially brand-diluting or revenue-reducing domains as seems reasonable. With cryptocurrency now penetrating the consciousness of ordinary people, now is a decent time as any to scoop up a few more destinations would-be customers might go.
Now that cryptocurrencies have made a pretty good claim to durability—even if their prices might fluctuate speculatively—the next big economic question is which institutions are going to muscle in first, if any.
Wall Street is too divided on the wisdom of crypto. As far as we can tell, the financial powers that be are not going to transform the status and usefulness of Bitcoin and company anytime soon. That leaves the playing field open for significant private entrants. Here you have your ideological benefactors, heavyweight speculators, bitcoin miners, and your international renegades, building up sudden, significant wealth they want to keep relatively free from global or national regulatory systems.
But there are limits to what cryptocurrency can do for the people poised to wield the most outsized control over it. Bitcoin, for instance, is a kludgy way to pay for most goods and services. Thanks to the blockchain, you do not want to try paying for that suitcase full of heroin you bought on the dark web using Bitcoin.
Amazon does have a mild but clear interest in doing its due diligence in brand protection and locking down all those URLs. And it does have a potential interest in making a hard-to-top move into crypto, although not necessarily any of the available currencies. What if the company instead just ramped up a product called, say, Primecoin?
A proprietary cryptocurrency, backed by the full faith and credit of the company? Picture a cross between a debit card and a points program. Would you receive special prices, discounts, and offers for using Primecoin? Of course you would. The announcement of something like Primecoin would risk touching off some kind of currency race among retailers.
But only the very largest would be able to scale it up, and most would have little reason to bother. Think of how Spotify owns streaming audio, YouTube owns amateur streaming video, and Netflix owns professional streaming video. We already know that not every big tech company should bother with its own pay app.
Why should they bother with their own cryptocurrency? Amazon alone could do it, demonstrate its intuitive appeal, and make its dominance unassailable. Unless, that is, the U. Even if one is outraged by the behavior of some bankers, to call every member of the industry a participant in fraud is a profound injustice.
Many of the new reforms proposed by the Treasury Department aim to reverse bad effects of a law, freeing entrepreneurs to innovate while still safeguarding potential investors.
Is it brand protection? If small businesses really are struggling to get credit, fewer banking options likely makes that struggle more intense. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is counterproductive.
November 17, By James Poulos. Amazon bitcoin commerce cryptocurrency currency.
Setting too high from the other side, leads to no trades at all. The VNS decentralized website system will use the VNS address instead of the IP. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement unless specified. I just wondered if anyone else uses Kucoin exchange. Once the object becomes part of the program, the processing instruction may or may not be activated.