Bitcoin Forum

Talking when lightning proven and ready.

Any reason why Amazon wouldn't or couldn't start a trial program on the lightning network now that there are futures to hedge "currency" risk?

Say trial program of $100mm USD (say they need to go buy 6,500 BTC) to match everyone's channel. (Beta so say very limited users)

Any reason that wouldn't work? And if the only non working part is "how Amazon gonna buy that many coins" then BTC has a huge problem and will die very quickly. I don't see this as a case but if you ever start making the argument, not enough coins. Then it ain't ever gonna work as a currency/payment system. Will solely be store of value and not a very good one due to very limited liquidity.

Amazon is a major globlist organisation, and they want to create their own world currency. In my opinion, the only reason that Amazon would accept Bitcoin is to suck the coins out of the market.

LOL Amazon don't want to create a world currency. They basically can't compete withan hipotetical Google's curency.

I think it's a negative thing if they did start accepting bitcoin as a payment method. bitcoin is unstable and people would lose so much paying with it . Amazon will turn that bitcoin into fiat and the buyers most likely would be cooperates against cryptocurrency.

If they think it's a market worth tapping, there's no reason not to. Square obviously thinks it's a market worth entering. Now that there is a safe way to hedge their exposure (regulated futures), they can be market makers in a booming market. And compared to Square, ApplePay and AmazonPayments, Coinbase is clunky and unfamiliar. So I think they have every reason to enter the space, once you consider that they are trying to infiltrate most retail industries in general.


There's no reason it wouldn't work. This is literally what Square just did with their beta rollout, which is now being rolled out to more users as we speak. The OTC market would happily entertain Amazon, no doubt, and they can easily and safely hedge their position come next week.

Infact, if amazon decides to join then the cryptocurrency will surely see a sudden rise and it will work either ways. So far, i am not seeing them coming in this mode because they are already reaching many highs. It might take a six months to a year for them to chime in.

Amazon cant even organize their warehouse goods delivery buffer .. that's why they pay the "maximum minimum wage" to their warehouse employees

But bitcoin would be useless if no ones accepts it, what are you going to do with your btc once that they become useless? are you going to eat them all?

Amazon will never accept bitcoin, it is impossible, and if it really happens, the massive hype that bitcoin could have would be amazing.

Amazon is greedy as fuck, probably they will start their own crypto, or just tokens, but the are going to ride their own crypto, i am sure of that

I think that all the real capital ( "energy 'in' system feed") comes from human beings activit  ...

BBC Panorama - Amazon The Truth Behind the Click BBC documentary behind amazon shopping 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQATFbLvIHk

In order to just gather the coins, they would need too much money and if they just store the bitcoins after, they will have that money out of their cash-flow, so if they are liquid enough, that will not be a problem, but I doubt it...
It's an understandable idea that they want their own currency and in order to support it they will accept bitcoin in order to make bitcoin's situation harder but it's not realistic. It's more possible that they will try to minimize the risk of the volatile price, but I haven't read anywhere that they're just thinking about bitcoin as an acceptable payment type.

Just kinda thinking out loud. Good point about cash flow. They would have to outlay $100mm and it would just sit there....but if they hedged with futures/options and sold $100mm worth BTC on CME/CBOE they would receive that $100mm back minus small carry cost which write off anyway.

Edit: guess wouldn't get all $100mm back due to margin maintance etc but get a lot of it back.

As far as I know, there were successful tests of lightning network on the testnet. It will still take a lot of time before it will be implemented on the mainnet and then added to wallets. It's quite interesting to see it but Litecoin has introduced LN much earlier. Steam removed Bitcoin payments a few days ago and now... they are back. Quite amusing, isn't it? Amazon will probably wait a little bit longer. I will pay with Bitcoin as soon as it becomes available. It's pain to cash out BTC in order to buy more GPUs for mining.

Starting to think all these big retailers don't want to deal with bitcoin's volatility.

For a listed company like Amazon to support Bitcoin as a payment method, they would probably need a couple of things.

Price stability - Bitcoin's price is really volatile compared to any other currencies.  Amazon's involvement probably would bring more speculation for bitcoin, as a listed company, they probably don't want to be associated with any potential speculation and unknown social impact.

Technical Maturity - Amazon will probably wait for Lightening network to be deployed and proven its usage before adopting.

Commercial Viability - In addition to the current high transaction fee, How to deal with refunds, handling payment issues and buyer protections are among those practical areas that Amazon needs to train the support team of. I assume they will need to be sure that the revenue coming from the crypto currency really outweigh the investment and cryto will indeed become a long term payment channel.

These might take a while and wider segwit adoption is a crucial next step.

What you are saying makes some sens. Having a futures market, helps to hedge bitcoin in order to keep them from harms safe, but that is still not the best option in my opinion. If they have many sells, they can short bitcoin, in order to keep profits in case the price goes down, but I think that if they actually accept bitcoin as a payment method they won't hold the coins. They will probably accept and sell them right away, as most merchants that already accept BTC do. This way they re not speculating with the price, so they don't really need futures to be safe. What they normally complain is the high fees, the lower transaction speeds and the volatility that makes it hard for users to buy things with BTC. So I guess that what they need in order to accept BTC as a payment method, is the lightning network, and high liquidity that hopefully will lead to low volatility.

Wait....someone just told me. And I read it in 2 other sources. That only 1 party needs to commit funds. Both can, but at least 1 has to.

I thought both had to commit same BTC amount. Example. I open a channel with Amazon and I want to do 1 BTC, I thought Amazon has to also commit 1btc so we have a total of 2.

I read this isn't the case. I can open a channel with Amazon and I only commit xx BTC? If this is the case, that's a game changer. That's the future then. Amazon will accept btc that way and can hedge BTC risk by shorting the futures just like all companies do with currency risk. Apple hedges currencies with china, India etc.

Can anyone confirm if both parties need same commitment of btc or only 1 party needs to add Btc in?

I just confirmed this on twitter with actual lightning.

Holy shix this is a game changer. Amazon won't have to outlay $100mm/6,500 coins. Only 1 party has to commit BTC. This is it. This is the future.

They don't want to make their own currency, they want to make as much money as possible for their shareholders and Bezos (who is also a shareholder) They have no issue with Bitcoin, if they can use it to make more money then so be it they'd go ahead and use it.

I don't see a need for Amazon to even try to use a lightning network, everything on there is working fine as of now. The only reason they'd do this is if there was data showing people aren't using them due to not using a network like this, not supporting bitcoin transactions on their site, and so on and so forth.

Businesses don't change to be nice, they do it for the money and the MONEY ONLY.