Bitcoin Forum

How much money....... would amazon make if it secretly bought up loads of bitcoins.......... then suddenly announced it accepted bitcoins for everything on all of their sites?
Let's say they managed to buy a million bitcoins.
It seems that amazon might have a problem.......... with states wanting to enforce taxing. I wonder if bitcoin would help solve amazon's problem by making any such laws unenforceable?
discuss.

It would be a non-starter. Amazing isn't going to use Bitcoin as a tax evasion mechanism. It's a real company.

Amazon voluntarily entered agreements with the states to collect state sales taxes.  Whether they accept for payment dollars or bananas (or bitcoins) wouldn't change the agreement they entered into.

In the EU for example, most big US (especially internet) companies pay low single digit taxes by structuring their companie(s) in a way that one is in a place with low/zero taxes for intellectual property, another is licensing the "IP" to them and does not make a taxable profit by that etc. (quick google: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/03/amazon-google-starbucks-tax-avoidance)

All in all Amazon pays <12% tax. I don't think switching fully or partly to Bitcoin would even remotely pay off evading these. Other internet companies have even less incentive.

Sorry, but Bitcoin might work for you as tax evasion instrument, but not for a big company that can afford just building itself around tax evasion in the first place.

FTFY

It's the means of paying so little without breaking tax laws that they all that money for.  Evasion is illegal.  Avoidance is smart (or inconsiderate/cheating, depending on your perspective).

Why would they buy bitcoins before they started accepting them?

If they bought 1 million bitcoins at $20 (and somehow prevented that causing a price spike) and then announced they would accept them, then the price might jump to $100.  Then they could sell their coins for $80 million in profits.

There is some risk about it though and it might not really be worth their while.

That's actually my main point... the tax issue was just a side question.
If bitcoins went "mainstream" what single better way could it than if amazon did so? And They would make millions of dollars if they bought some before they did it. I would hope.

ignoring tax issues.... wouldn't bitcoin still be a good thing for amazon as far as credit card fees are concerned? I know they have their own credit card but wouldn't they get a better deal using bitcoin than if they accepted credit cards (other than their own? )

I don't think one could buy BTC1 million at $20 each, somehow! :) $250 maybe...

Well obviously it would make sense to buy some bitcoins before announcing you're going to accept them. 1 million BTC might be a bit too much, but Amazon or some other big online retailer could always put in something like 10 million USD (and receive perhaps 200k - 400k BTC in return) to anticipate a rise in prices. I wonder if laws considering insider trading would apply, though they can always say the bought bitcoins to have some change at hand.

Shouldn't be a problem once there is a solution for the 1MB block size limit. Bitcoin wouldn't as decentralized as it is today since older computers or people with slow connections won't be able to act as a node, but the network as a whole should be able to handle this perfectly.

They would still have to pay taxes.  At some point they would have to convert back to USD to pay their suppliers.

Even so, lets say they found a way to force all their suppliers to accept BTC, so their revenue and expenses were BTC only, they still have to follow General Account practices as they are a public company.  They are beholden to their share holders, so no matter what the vehicle is for value transfer they are still going to show a profit and that is taxable.

Lol $80 million in profits is nothing to a company the size of Amazon. One of their shipping facilities probably costs that much a month to maintain. This idea would be stupid and a complete waste of time. And them buying up a virtual currency with only intrinsic value would probably cause their stock price to drop; based on the fact that Jeff Bezos would have to had developed a severe case of autism to have done something this stupid.

They reinvest all their profits, that's why their stock price remains so high even with terrible fundamentals. Shit source, shit article.

what if that conjectured 80 million profit is a gross underestimation? What if it was in the billions?  couldn't amazon still work out tax issues with bitcoins and pay taxes normally?

Great argument for Bitcoin. Have large corporations use it to launder money.

Even then its a stupid argument, because the corporations still have tax obligations. Bitcoin is still irrelevant.

Amazon will never accept Bitcoins.
Neither will Google or Apple.
Those big corporations have an ego problem and also they will never go for something that doesn't belong to them.
Last but not least the entire current Bitcoin capitalization (250 mio $)  is a grain of sand for them.
Less than a day worth of their turnover.
Bitcoin is still a colibrì, it wouldn't be wise to try to copulate with an elephant.
Never forget: size matters!
;-)

They probably will accept BTC, some day, but only after many others already have, and only because they'll have no choice.

I'm still finding it funny that the big IT monster everyone was scared of only a few years back was Microsoft -who don't even feature on many of these lists anymore.  Never is a big word to use for markets as dynamic as these where everything can change so quickly.  Remember Microsoft had bet against the internet ever becoming big and were latecomers to that scene.  But you're right about bitcoin being waaay too small now with the significant but still tiny money supply at a quarter billion USD.

Just to put things into the right perspective the total value of all the bitcoins equals about 3 hours of the US deficit.
This means that the USA lose every 3 hours about a quarter billion dollars.
For the moment being adopted as a form of payment by any of these 800 pound gorillas will mean the end of bitcoin, as it doesn't have the infrastructure in place to bear the weight.
Bitcoin is already showing signs of stress, with daily oscillations of about 3/4%...

Be careful folks what you are wishing for.....
;-)

Amazon would never do that, they don't care about the market cap right now and would want propriatory technology.

Corporations like announcing a loss as it offsets there corperation tax.

Corporations are run by middle-aged people terrified of getting fired for agreeing with something unsuccessful, not bald men in highbacked chairs. An online retailer isn't going to engage in currency manipulation.
I now know what a colibri is. Something new every day...

Nope, not going to happen. Amazon or other large companies will never do these kind of decentralized and risky forms of payments.

The amount of baseless conjecture in this thread is astounding.

And I also can't get a vivid image of an elephant copulating with colibri out of my head

Amazon will never accept bitcoin because they cant take 30% of it as profit.

It would be awesome if Amazon started accepting Bitcoin as a payment option. (For those of you not familiar with the site, Amazon is like the Silk Road of state-approved consumer goods.)