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Recently, PayPal announced several partnerships aimed towards enabling certain PayPal merchants to be able to accept bitcoin as a form of payment from their customers. That increase was short-lived, as the price came back down the following day, but the spike showed the power that this kind of tectonic announcement could have on the bitcoin world.
Though there are still details remaining to surface around how the bitcoin integration into PayPal will ultimately work, on the surface the benefits appear obvious.
For merchants, the attraction would be the opportunity to add an additional payment option that works with their existing checkout infrastructure read: For consumers, the value is that increasingly consumers are holding bitcoin and looking for places to spend it; and more choice in payment methods is always a good thing. Additionally, bitcoin via PayPal could present low-cost opportunities to send funds globally.
Ironically, bitcoin embodies much of the core mission that PayPal originally set out to achieve. We wanted the shopkeeper in Bolivia to have access to the same payment capabilities and pricing as a giant retailer in London, simply by using new, better technology. I was one of the original employees at PayPal, and the bitcoin announcement felt full circle in a way from those roots. There are multiple hurdles to clear for bitcoin to become widely used and adopted by the masses, and carrying the flag for these hurdles right now is security.
And though PayPal is only slowly venturing into the shallow end with some floaties on, herein lies the challenge…even objection for PayPal and others as they embark into digital currencies. The reason for this is two-fold: In order to properly address the sort of nefarious activity that has and will continue to occur in the bitcoin world, companies need to be experts in bitcoin protocol, payment security and network security.
Related to the theft topic is the lack of traditional consumer protections within bitcoin transactions: The best example of this is multi-signature key management. With multi-signature wallets, the customer and their wallet provider each have a key that is required to perform a transaction much like the old rocket launch analogy where two different key holders are required to launch the rocket into the sky.
Utilization of this technology with other mechanisms such as MFA and fraud monitoring would actually create a secure environment that exceeds the approach of institutions for traditional financial transactions. Cryptocurrency security is difficult; not everyone can be an expert in this area. But the beauty of the situation is the bitcoin protocol has inherent to it multi-signature capabilities that, if executed correctly, can create a highly secure environment.
Even more exciting is that success in making bitcoin transactions and accounts secure means a strong chance of success in the ultimate prize with digital currency: Ken Miller is an investor, writer and advisor to several technology companies and venture capital firms.
Previously he was an executive at PayPal and Intuit, and early advisor to Square.