Bitcoin trop volatile pour une monnaie réelle – Dan Schulman
While PayPal co-founder Max Levchin refrained from out rightly criticizing Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, the company’s CEO, Dan Schulman recently spoke to The Street, saying that it won’t work with Bitcoin anytime soon.
“I think right now, and we’re seeing this maybe more than ever, the volatility of the cryptocurrency makes it actually unsuitable to be a real currency that retailers can accept. Because retailers have very narrow margins and when you have a Bitcoin bouncing up and down by 15 percent over a couple weeks’ period, that can be the difference between profits and losing money on every sale,” he said.
The retail industry, according to the S&P 500’s statistics on returns on equity and net margins, is one of the least profitable industries in the world, averaging a 2-5% margin depending on subsector.
To hedge against the cryptocurrency’s volatility, retailers could simply exchange it for fiat.
However, there’s currently a large fee for this, and it’s just not worth the cost unless the business exchanges large quantities of Bitcoin in a short period.
Just yesterday, we found out that Microsoft axed its offer for Bitcoin as a payment option. Rumors speculate that the reason for this has to do with a low volume of incoming payments and a high transfer fee.
Steam made a similar decision, citing the cryptocurrency’s volatility, although it is still leaving the option on the table.
Schulman may not believe in Bitcoin, but he has positive things to say about blockchain technology.
“I think you need to separate out the Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as currencies and the underlying protocol called blockchain,” he said.
His response to the crypto space bears a strong resemblance to what the heads of other financial institutions and payment processors had to say.
Just yesterday, the Bank of Israel’s Deputy Governor, Nadine Baudot-Tjatenberg, clarified the institution’s position on cryptocurrencies, calling them financial assets rather than currencies.