Will Bitcoins change the hosting industry?
As you probably know, Bitcoins are first virtual, decentralized currency, that have the advantage of getting directly through the web to a specific person or service, without going through the bank or other money-holding industries. Held only on electronic accounts, they match the hosting-cloud like model, but will they have an influence on how people purchase or hold their income online?
A new cloud era…
We are getting more and more used to services based on a cloud, and that influences the trust, that we might share, when it comes to virtual wallets. Based on mathematical code, that is open sourced, “mined” on a distributed network, Bitcoins separate a physical bank or assistant from your payments, and instead give it all up to the computers. Fast, transferred almost immediately, is one of the features, that they share with the cloud industry. The processes are fully digitized and simple to set up, more over accepted by companies like Microsoft, WordPress or Etsy. What’s interesting, you can have several bitcoin accounts that can’t be directly connected to you, and yes, bitcoins are on the stock, doing pretty well.
… With some problems at hand
It’s said that there are about 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users having a Bitcoin wallet. As those accounts are anonymous, it’s hard to tell, how many real users are holding such payments. It’s also hard to follow such actions like buying illegal products, owning websites with forbidden content, or how to secure transactions, and be sure, that the transferred money go to the right accounts. After all, banks cooperate with the legal system, and any hacking accidents are covered by their site. Same concerns come with the cloud operating systems — there are still said to be not completely safe, as more and more devices connected to the cloud allow more opportunities in breaking to the shared network.
Revolution coming our way?
The hosting industry might benefit, but also suffer from the spread online wallets usage — first of all, we must commit that online wallets will grow in popularity but it might not be the Bitcoins or it’s alternatives that play the part, but Google wallet for example, or any other renown companie’s idea, that holds trust worldwide. Payment gateways will end with electronical wallets sooner or later. Bitcoins however, brought up the theme from the closet, and made users feel comfortable about non-governed, spread systems, which might be a quite good step for cloud industry. On the other hand, Bitcoins are still the last chosen option for online payments, and it might be still hard to learn how to develop such services, if there’s literally no one responsible for the transactions. There might be customer’s service troubles or ones, that concern security — for now, still left with no answers. Adding Bitcoins as your payment method is easy to set up, and cost you nothing, but for the checkout to be profitable or popular — well, on this one, we have to wait.
