AMC Theather (the largest cinema company in the United States) announced today that Bitpay will accept Shiba Inu Shiba Inu (SHIB), as payment. It is their first client to do so.
The company is working to accept a variety of cryptocurrencies for payment. It now allows this through PayPal. Payments can be made in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum, ETH, Lietcoin(LTC) and Bitcoin Cash.
AMC may also accept the meme cryptocurrencies Dogecoin(DOGE) or Shiba Inu(SHIB), owing to the incredible popularity they have shown on Twitter in polls conducted by Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC.
Shiba inu received 124,623 votes for her support in the latest Twitter poll. This brings us to today’s announcement, in which Bitpay shares the spotlight. PayPal will stop being the primary payment method for cryptocurrencies at the AMC website in 3 months.
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Bitpay as a theater payment option does more than allow for cryptos. This is an excellent marketing strategy by AMC. But it also highlights the limitations of Paypal with four crypto currencies and only four services. These are not as great as actual crypto wallets.
PayPal Users Claim Fake Numbers as Crypto
At the beginning of the year, Paypal launched a new service enabling its customers to “buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account”. Since then, Paypal has reported an increase in active accounts of 22% per year. Now they have 361,000,000 users.
Paypal seems to think this has been a profitable marketing strategy. The main goal was to get clients to stay and use other features.
Paypal, however, does not offer its users a cryptocurrency wallet. There are also no private keys. The cryptocurrency purchased in PayPal is mostly usable within its retail network.
Essentially, what the platform does is hold the user’s cryptocurrencies on its behalf, but does not provide them with a real one. Paypal does not allow for anonymity or limit the options you can use your funds. Many people consider this a defeat to the purpose of cryptocurrency.
Back to when the company made the announcement, many Reddit users described the feature as something that gives “fake numbers as crypto”, stating that this is not an intent of adoption of crypto, but the monopolization of it, and if the mainstream adoption of crypto were to follow this path, it would not be different as “the banks holding all the money”.
One user suggested that PayPal “will simply let people think they are using Bitcoin when they’re really not, and then use the blockchain as a settlement layer. And then we’re right back in a central bank dystopia.”
This feature was expanded by PayPal towards Venmo. A spokesperson shared with Bloomberg that offering crypto is “part of Venmo’s continued evolution from a peer-to-peer payments app to a more holistic offering that our customers rely on in their everyday financial lives.”
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PayPal vs. Bitpay
PayPal’s crypto announcements did have some highlights, as its already wide platforms could increase the public’s acceptance of major coins. Others thought the platform could increase their value and imagined the possibility of the company allowing withdrawals.
BitPay’s crypto-related features, however, are better and more in line with crypto ideals. BitPay customers claim it makes Bitcoin transactions from other wallets easy. It allows payment from anywhere. Bitcoin can also be converted into other currencies or transferred to a debitcard. The platform lets users create a Bitcoin wallet and offer to convert it to dollars.
Non-custodial wallets, such as BitPay’s, are described as decentralized because the customer gets to own its private keys and has total control over their funds, opposingly to PayPal’s service.
FinancesOnline has BitPay (100%) rating vs. PayPal (97%). Now being under the eye of AMC’s huge customer base and SHIB’s enthusiasts, will BitPay be overshadowing PayPal as a payment method?