I’m not going into the <i>flaw</i> that, I believe surrounds Bitcoin and its algorithm (in particular that I believe Bitcoin isn’t acting like a currency as its incentivising hoarders & due to that this will lead to a recession and because the money supply does not expand it will evolve into a depression) but rather the issue around Amazon adopting Bitcoin today.<p>First of all let’s put some perspective here – Bitcoin’s market cap has only recently passed $1 Billion mark[1] whereas, Amazon comprises of 12-20% of online sales (depending on where you look) which makes them the 15th largest US Store.<p>One of the problems with Bitcoin is despite its low fees, transaction speed is <i>much</i> slower than you’re standard debit/credit card & considerably slower than the 1-click card you already have on file with Amazon. Whilst you may not consider this important, considering that Amazon is trying to get to same-day delivery (especially as eBay already do this[2]) then having to wait for the transaction to verify significantly affects shipping times & Amazon’s intentions to do same-day delivery.<p>Likewise, going back into my earlier point about Bitcoin only recently reaching the $1B market cap[1] no one really knows exactly how much “financial bandwidth”[3] that the Bitcoin market can carry & and since Bitcoin is highly volatile, if Amazon entered the market at this point it would add even more volatility to the market which in turn makes it more difficult for vendors – who value stability. Moreover, $1 Billion isn’t a significant amount of money (you can argue otherwise but look at Global GDP etc) and Bitcoin is still maturing which, means they still have to demonstrate resiliency to attacks from organized-crime/hackers, spam transactions etc as well as, the fact that it will be <i>high-risk both legally and financially</i> for Amazon especially as, Bitcoin will have a sudden large influx in market cap (after all it is really volatile).<p>Additionally, Amazon are already looking at Virtual Currencies[4] which suggests that they will probably be looking at them closer over the long-term.<p>[1] <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/bitcoin-how-an-unregulated-decentralized-virtual-currency-just-became-a-billion-dollar-market/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/bitcoin-how-an-unregulated-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://now.ebay.com" rel="nofollow">http://now.ebay.com</a><p>[3] <a href="http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Bandwidth" rel="nofollow">http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Bandwidth</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d46a9fc-6fbc-11e2-956b-00144feab49a.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d46a9fc-6fbc-11e2-956b-00144feab4...</a>