By Serach Nissim
As the value of Bitcoin has surged exponentially, the next step is to make it an easy to use currency.
Over the past year, the value of a single unit of Bitcoin jumped from under $10,000 to over $30,000.
As reported by the NY Times, big tech companies like Square and IBM are working to make the crypto-currency accessible for more purchases. The currency, which uses blockchain technology, can be used to make purchases on Amazon, using a third party service called Purse. The problem is that though Bitcoin is expanding its horizon as a method of digital payment, the process for users is not simple. To use Purse, a customer can select items to buy on Amazon and copy the URLs onto Purse’s site, to process the purchase, with Purse utilizing gift cards it’s acquired from people who want cryptocurrency. Purse guarantees its customers a minimum discount of five percent off Amazon’s list prices, and offers the option to negotiating for up to fifteen percent off—but getting that to actually work is not assured. Customer assistance in the form of chat is not always instantaneous either. It’s hardly a one click process. “Bitcoin is just not the most efficient currency yet,” said Henry Elder, the head of wealth management at Wave Financial, a digital assets company in California.
There are other quirks to using Bitcoins for purchases, says the chief executive of Overstock Jonathan Johnson. Overstock was one of the first to start accepting the cryptocurrency on their site in 2014. He noted that not a great deal of purchases are made using Bitcoin. “Our demographic skews hard towards women and Bitcoin purchasers tend to be men,” Johnson said. “It’s a different customer segment.” He also shared that the explosive valuation for Bitcoin complicates things like returns. Johnson said Overstock’s policy for Bitcoins has always been that the refund would match the dollar price of the item -not the quantity of Bitcoin spent. “We weren’t going to let people use their bedsheets as a hedge against a price decline in Bitcoin,” he said. “People would say ‘I bought my patio furniture for 0.1 Bitcoins and now you’re only refunding me 0.08 bitcoin?’ We were like ‘Yup.’”
Bitcoin was traditionally desirable in concealing the identity of users, and therefore choice for those buying and selling contraband, or other disconcerting purchases. That anonymity has not held up. Now though, many more retailers are setting up payment systems that enable Bitcoin transactions, and buying Bitcoin through companies like Coinbase and Bitpay, to enable their transactions.
