Enabling Bitcoin Payments
The Curious Case of Bitcoin(s)
If news reports are to be believed, Bitcoin (BTC), apparently, rose from a deep slumber at the start of the month. The price of 1 Bitcoin had been subdued for so long that it had stopped making headlines for the right reasons (adoption and development) and instead focused on the seemingly endless rounds of forking. If you recall, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) came into existence in August 2017, as an alternative to scaling Bitcoin (BTC). By the end of 2018, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain had further forked resulting in yet another offspring, the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV). By March 2019, BSV appeared to be on track, mining its first 128MB block. The momentous occasion was hailed as a “rebirth of the Bitcoin”, “the era of new money”, with many hopes riding on its potential to achieve massive scale.
The euphoria was short lived. Last week, Binance decided to delist the BSV token. Shortly thereafter, anonymous exchange ShapeShift and crypto data supplier and cryptocurrency wallet Blockchain.com also dropped BSV. There are countless words written about the events that led to the fallout with lots of juicy tidbits, fit to be a Hollywood blockbuster.
All of this is pure, unadulterated NOISE.
The fact remains that Bitcoin (BTC) has gained a position of strength and leads the way. Bitcoin’s market dominance, share of BTC as a percentage of total market capitalization is at 53%, with a market cap just shy of $100B. In the last year, both the hash rate (representing the number of double SHA-256 computations performed in one second) and the number of daily transactions on the BTC network have almost doubled. Blockchain wallet, often taken as a proxy for the number of Bitcoin users, now has 35M users — that is almost 1.5x the number of stock trading accounts on TDAmeritrade and Charles Schwab combined.
And the developers and businesses are noticing the real euphoria. Overstock has long accepted Bitcoin as a legitimate form of payments. Now, a new startup Moon, is enabling Amazon (and soon a whole bunch of e-commerce sites) to accept Bitcoin payments.
Moon is a payment processing startup that provides a browser extension that enables users to pay through any lightning enabled wallet. Amazon itself does not transact in bitcoin. Moon’s extension integrates with traditional financial institutions and crypto exchanges to convert bitcoin to fiat to enable the transactions in real time. By 2020, the company aims to equip any website to sell online and accept bitcoin as a means of payment.
[The extension] will pop up a QR code and it will have the lightning invoice, which you could also copy and paste if you can’t use the QR code for some reason, and you’ll be able to pay with your favorite lightning wallet.” There’s no direct merchant integration. We’re integrating with the Visa and Mastercard networks and we get a cut of the interchange fees that merchants pay every time they receive a credit card transaction.
— Ken Kruger, CEO, Moon
Under the radar, the payments processing landscape is undergoing a massive revolution As companies like Moon start to roll out newer applications especially for mobile interfaces, it is not hard to see that the adoption will scale rapidly.
Originally published at https://proteum.substack.com.
