Background:

Target retail stores were victims of a security breach during the time period of November 27, and December 15 where an estimated 110 million credit and debit card transaction records were stolen. This was widely reported with world-wide news coverage. Officials from several credit card issuing banks worked feverishly to correct the situation with credit card holders before the holidays.

Presenting Your First Use-Case for Digital Currency Advantage for Local Merchant Shopping

Hello? Is this Target – the giant retail store chain? Yes, my name is Bitcoin – I come from the future. I bring you good news! In the future your current problems will go away. It was inevitable really, I just wanted you to rest easy knowing that you played an important role for giving the world one of the first real-world use cases for using Bitcoin instead of credit cards for local merchants.

You remember that incident that happened a few months back? Yes, I’m sure you still don’t want to talk about it, but it’s important for the world to understand that your current misery is going to act as a reference point for all other major retailers in a relatively short amount of time.

I’m guessing you usually spend quite a bit of your budget in security related matters. You must protect your servers and networks against hackers and viruses, etc. Your embarrassing security breach was the worst kind which involved the possibility of your customers being “inconvenienced” with having to replace credit cards with new ones and the possible loss of trust. Yes, I’m sure that will sting for a while. You already know those banks that had to work overtime to handle this mess on their end with replacing cards and reaching out to their customers will eventually be coming to collect those costs from you. That’s going to be expensive. Start preparing yourself for the next earning session and take a deep breath before you speak of the figure your stockholders use to gage your performance compared to the previous year…“same store sales”. They will brace for it – but it will still sting. The slim 5 or less net profit margins that are customary in the retail industry aren’t going to be enough this round. One day the panic that is ringing through your company will eventually subside.

You see Bitcoin was barely gaining momentum enough to be on the radar for many large companies in 2013. It certainly wasn’t your fault that you were chosen to be the example. You will eventually come around to the fact that you wished Bitcoin had started a few years earlier while you could have taken advantage of it. Because accepting it meant you had your cash right away and had zero liability for keeping your customer banking data private. Your customers didn’t have to worry about their private banking information being sold on the black market to the highest bidders. It would have saved you all of this embarrassment, loss of sales, security systems revamp and evaluation, court costs and more.

Well enough with the bad news. Now I bring you hope.

In 2013 your customers didn’t yet realize the advantage that paying with digital currency would protect their privacy and stop their risk to identity theft. But fear not – they’ll come around to it. It’s natural law. Water finds the path of least resistance as everything in life does. Having to give out credit card information and cvc codes, even debit PIN numbers that get compromised certainly qualifies as “resistance” doesn’t it? You helped bring in a new era that changed how the world thought about money. In hindsight we can now see how quaint credit cards were.

Keep your chin up Target. You took one for the team and played an important part for the world that got an important wake up call because of what you went through. The Bitcoin network is coming to the rescue. Now don’t get too excited, the future is not set. I am only one of your possible paths. But this much is certain, when people began to ask the important question about the benefits of paying local merchants with bitcoin they will think of you. You’ve given the world a real and important use-case of “identity protection”. For that, bitcoin thanks you.