I was reading the article, As Big Investors Emerge, Bitcoin Gets Ready for Its Close-Up, and am amazed how far people are taking Bitcoin as a real currency. I read in the article that there are investors paying substantial real money to acquire Bitcoins. The article states they hope retail places like Starbuck or Amazon may accept this currency.
When I go to Marketwatch.com and compare the currency exchange rates, GBP: USD, for example, I’d like to see this currency listed so I understand the actual value, the futures of this ‘foreign’ currency. There are many economic questions regarding the creation of a currency, and the belief in that currency. Look at Greece and the Euro, the Peso, the Loonie, speaking of, it seems that there may be a market for bitcoins, but not in the traditional sense that ‘physical’ goods are currently exchanged.
Bitcoins will be traded for the use of cloud resources and services, such as computation cycles, and other cloud applications and resources. If Grid Computing, where users allow the utilization of their computation resources as I suggest in my Post Grid and Cloud Computing Going Head to Head: Profit for You, then both Cloud and Grid computing can trade in Bitcoins,and what they buy is cloud resource utilization. An exchange may exist so people can trade, and the value of these coins may have value, allowing for the ‘tangible’ purchase of computation resource, which may actually mean something.
This approach gets muddied when you are able to apply cloud printing resources which print 3D ‘physical’ goods. I would have to see major cloud players, such as Amazon to allow for the acceptance of these coins.
For starters, I can see, if you acquire an Amazon Visa or Mastercard, instead of the points system where the cardholder gets reward points, they can be allocated Bitcoins. Amazon would have to acquire real Bitcoins, and an exchange would have to be established, so if Amazon’s clients are distributed Bitcoins, they are given the proper allocation, e.g. 1 USD to N Bitcoins. Anyway, Starbucks coffee for thought.
Here are a few other ideas for Bitcoin Applications:
- Atlantic City, Las Vegas, or Other Physical Casino slot machines that accept and pay out in Bitcoins
- On line gaming, such as on line poker or slots, that accept and pay out Bitcoins
- Affinity Card programs that pay out in Bitcoins, according to their own standard, anything from On line stores like Amazon, to Computer Electronics Brick and Mortar stores to Credit Cards
- PayPal, or other intermediary transaction firms that allow their customers to send and receive Bitcoins as payment. The transaction intermediary firm may have an independent account for Bitcoins specifically, exclusive from other currencies.