I spoke to an online payments industry employee at manifest who had a really strong inside view against Amazon accepting bitcoin (“<1% by 2030”) because he says Amazon negotiate contracts with chase such that I should model their cost of accepting the store card as less than zero (it’s some kind of loss leader for chase and they make the money back on loans). Also that coinbase is not a sufficiently reliable counterparty for tradfi compared to banks. Also that the political miasma around crypto would set back amazon’s lobbying efforts.

Known unknowns:

What percentage of Amazon revenue uses other credit cards at standard 3%ish fee rates

Could a crypto exchange negotiate a similar deal to Chase?

Could a more crypto-friendly administration be elected in the US soon?

I'm assuming the criteria will be #3 below and probably meant to be general, but just making sure:

1. To count as accepting "Bitcoin", does the transaction have to be transferred on the base chain?

2. If not 1, can it be a 2nd layer transaction such as a lightning channel, but that must still be owned/held directly by the BTC user?

3. If not 3, can it be an IOU from a bank that holds BTC custodially for their customers, and Amazon accepts the bank's IOU, which may or may not be settled and which is theoretically equivalent to BTC?

@ScroogeMcDuck Sidechains and 3rd party payment processors all count as accepting bitcoin.

BTW, the way 3rd party payment processors work is the user sends bitcoin to the PP, and the PP increments the merchant's USD balance, which it periodically wires to the merchant through the dinosaur banking system. The merchant never has to touch BTC directly, and pays a fee for the convenience, which is similar to credit card fees. It is about as easy to set up as accepting credit cards. But sufficiently large merchants should do it in-house so they can pay ~0% instead of 1-2% of each transaction. There is no comparable way for sufficiently large merchants to avoid paying any credit card fees.

@JonathanRay Since Amazon’s retail margins are so low, reducing the 3% credit card fees down to 0.1% bitcoin exchange fees would be a huge boost to their bottom line

Where is the “never “ option?

@Kabose Never is included in “2050s or later”. It will resolve to that is Amazon hasn’t added bitcoin by 2050.