According to a new study, more than 50 percent of retailers utilizing Square Inc.’s checkout technology would be willing to accept bitcoin (BTC) as a form of payment.
bitcoin Acceptance on the Rise
A Nomura Instinet-conducted survey of roughly 100 merchants in the United States revealed that 60 percent would accept over USD.
As by Bloomberg, the merchants surveyed spanned various industries and all had a minimum of $100,000 in annual revenue. Roughly 40 percent of those polled fell between the ages of 31 and 40.
The willingness to accept bitcoin came as a surprise to those conducting the survey. Said Nomura Instinet analyst Dan Doley in a report:
This result is surprising, especially amid bitcoin’s elevated volatility.
Square Inc. itself has been a proponent of the dominant cryptocurrency as of late.
Last November, Square began affording select customers the ability to buy bitcoin on its Cash App — a popular app which allows users to send money to each other. In January, the company began rolling out the bitcoin-buying option to . Stated CEO Jack Dorsey in an earnings call in February:
bitcoin, for us, is not stopping at buying and selling. We do believe that this is a transformational technology for our industry and we want to learn as quickly as possible.
bitcoin has its Haters
Of course, not everyone believes in bitcoin’s potential as a currency.
Last month, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney that bitcoin has failed as both a viable currency and as a store of value – citing volatility and the lack of vendor adoption. He told students at London’s Regent’s University:
It has pretty much failed thus far on … the traditional aspects of money. It is not a store of value because it is all over the map. Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange.
Carney later followed up his FUD-filled rhetoric in a speech to Bloomberg, :
The short answer is: they’re failing. Cryptocurrencies are poor stores of value. Over the past 5 years, the daily standard deviation of bitcoin was 10x that of sterling […] This extreme volatility reflects that the cryptocurrencies have neither intrinsic value nor external backing. Their worth rests on beliefs about their future supply and demand — ultimately about whether they’ll be successful as money.
Of course, not everyone listens to Carney, whose job is to defend the traditional financial institution bitcoin undermines — as evidenced by the increasing interest in accepting bitcoin as payment from vendors.
What do you think about bitcoin’s long-term prospects as a viable currency? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Reuters, Square Inc., Flickr/
Published at Thu, 15 Mar 2018 22:00:39 +0000
