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HIGHLIGHTS

  • Amazon has cleared that the speculation around its Bitcoin payments is not true.
  • The company has no plans of using cryptocurrency as payments at present.
  • Many other firms have hinted at such use in the past year.

Amazon has denied an ongoing rumour that associated the e-commerce major with cryptocurrency. The clarification comes amidst an increasingly shared speculation that the company will be accepting Bitcoin as a payment option for its buyers going forward.

Clearing its stance on the topic, an Amazon spokesperson on Monday said that the ongoing speculation around its specific plans for cryptocurrencies “is not true.” While the company made its current intentions known with the statement, it did not completely deny a later use of cryptocurrency as a payment option.

“We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon,” the spokesperson said. This means we could possibly see a future where we shop on Amazon using Bitcoins, though this will not be anytime soon.

The statement by Amazon comes in response to recent media reports that hinted at the company adopting Bitcoin payments for its online shopping experiences. The reports suggested that Amazon would start accepting such cryptocurrency payments by the end of this year.

Following the speculation, Bitcoin moved to gain up to 14.5 per cent in market value. Other cryptocurrencies mirrored the move, gaining much of the lost ground in the last few months.

The previous report cited an insider as the source for this information. Of course, now proven untrue, the speculation had its own grounds at the time, as many companies have announced their plans to incorporate cryptocurrencies in their business models in the past year.

Tesla, for instance, started accepting Bitcoin payments late last year, before shunning the practice on account of increasing pollution through heightened Bitcoin mining across the world. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, however, recently reassured the crypto community that the company will likely restart Bitcoin payments soon. The goal for this would be to shift the majority of the mining of the cryptocurrency onto renewable sources of energy.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are in the midst of a global fight for acceptance, as established financial institutions and regulatory authorities tend to shun their use. Even though cryptocurrencies have their own distinct advantages, authorities believe that the crypto industry is largely unregulated and can enable untraceable channels for several illegal activities.

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India today

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