What Does Paypal’s Bitcoin Integration Mean For The Future Of Digital Currency Adoption

Where Is Paypal Positioned In Digital Currency Market?

As observed recently the current trend with PayPal announcing several partnerships recently, aims towards enabling certain PayPal merchants to be able to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment from the customers. As a significant announcement on multiple fronts, many had wondered if and what PayPal’s foray into the cryptocurrency space would be. Furthermore, as the validation of the power of this news, the USD price of Bitcoin shot up over $ 30 within the first few hours of announcement generating close to half a billion in the Bitcoin market cap in those few hours. Even though the increase was short-lived the price came back down the following day, whereas the spike showed the power that this kind of tectonic announcement could have on the Bitcoin world.

Eventually, there remain details to surface around how the Bitcoin integration into PayPal is ultimately working out on the surface the benefits appear obvious. Whereas for merchants, the attraction is an opportunity to add additional payment options working with existing checkout infrastructure. Whereas for consumers the value comes as increasingly consumers hold Bitcoin looking for places to spend it with more choice in payment methods which is always a good thing. To that extent additionally, Bitcoin via PayPal presents low-cost opportunities to send funds globally. 

How Does Bitcoin Influence Paypal?

In this case, Bitcoin embodies much of the core mission ironically that PayPal originally set out to achieve whereas back in 2000, the mission statement of the company was Democratizing Global Payments which seeded the desire that we wanted to allow anyone anywhere in the world to send frictionless funds in the cheap 

The scenario is where a shopkeeper in Bolivia has access to the same payment capabilities, it is as a giant retailer in London who simply uses new better technology with exactly working out that way, where PayPal was merely built on top of existing decades-old payment infrastructure and its not cheap to use as the appetite for that libertarian-esque approach at the time and further galvanizing us all were one of the original employees at PayPal as well as the Bitcoin announcement felt full circle in a way from those roots. 

With that, there comes a problem with announcement and Bitcoin usage at large. With multiple hurdles to clear for Bitcoin to become widely used and adopted by the masses, and carrying the flag for these hurdles right now is security. 

With at least 9.9 percent of all bitcoins introduced into the ecosystem, it has been lost or stolen where nearly one out of every 10 bitcoins. The reason is twofold where the first one is Bitcoin like other financial instruments are a target for bad actors and secondly meaningful security around Bitcoin wallets and transaction has not yet been built into products where the reason is that it’s hard.

Defining Its Presence In The Crypto Space.

It is a fact that to properly address the sort of nefarious activity, that has and will continue to occur in the Bitcoin world where companies need experts in Bitcoin protocol, payment security and network security with difficult areas to be experts in for anyone let alone when your core focus tries figuring out how to grow a customer base and improve the front end-user experience.

As there are security solutions possible, the good news is they’re just not being widely utilized yet as the best example of this is multi-signature key management along with multi-signature wallets, the customer and their wallet provider each have a key required to perform the transaction. When utilizing this technology along with other mechanisms such as MFA as well as fraud monitoring would create a secure environment exceeding the approach of institutions for traditional financial transactions. 

Likewise, cryptocurrency security is difficult where not everyone is an expert in the area whereas making Bitcoin or the digital currency transactions and accounts secure is mandatory to future a success and large scale adoption as a shame on us as a technology society if we don’t get that right and secure the future. 

The Final Thoughts On The Discussion

In this context, the beauty of the situation is the Bitcoin protocol is inherent to its multi-signature capabilities that if executed correctly creates a highly secure environment which is more than exciting for the success in making those Bitcoin transactions and accounts secure which points to a strong chance of success in the ultimate prize with digital currency making those individuals sovereign again over their money.