The latest previously bitcoin only service provider to diversify following stupendous fees and network congestion might be Purse, an intermediary that matches Amazon gift card owners with bitcoiners – and now perhaps bitcoin cash – allowing you in effect to buy what you wish from Amazon with digital currencies at a discount.

Purse asked its followers in a poll whether they would like Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum to be added, but two leaks quickly came suggesting they had already chosen BCH.

The first was a bitcoin cash image on their website, while an eth one can’t be found. Purse claims it was there from previously allowing Bitcoin Cash withdrawals by BTC holders who were given an equal amount. However, some suggest that image was modified on the 20th of December.

More convincingly, a seemingly vocal Bitcoin Core supporter claimed Purse had already implemented the code for integrating Bitcoin Cash.

Here, Purse was perhaps caught red handed because instead of denying the code was theirs – thus so implicitly accepting it is theirs – they again claimed it was due to BCH withdrawals.

However, there was a little oversight of a tiny detail. By their own admission the BCH withdrawals were under the BCC ticker, which were more prominently used at the time.

The code, the veracity of which has not been denied by Purse, refers to BCH, not BCC. Therefore it probably was the withdrawal code, thus Purse might be technically correct, but that code has probably also been updated because if they do integrate BCH that will need withdrawals too so why not adapt what was and just change a little name.

There, peace on earth, with everyone given a way out. But some Bitcoin Core supporters were not happy. I won’t use Purse any more if it implements BCH, one of them said. Why? – he didn’t say.

Presumably he’d rather pay a $70 fee for a $20 t-shirt, but if that’s the case Purse would probably know far better than we do that he is likely very much a great exception.

If Purse does add Bitcoin Cash, then you can buy pretty much everything on Amazon with BCH and you even get a discount of around 10%-20%.

The company matches those who have Amazon gift cards with those who have BCH, with the end result being that instead of converting it to fiat and then buying some cheap Chinese merchandize, you can directly buy it with Bitcoin Cash.

That has tax implications, especially for those in UK and Australia and soon perhaps even in USA as London in particular differentiates between the use of crypto as currency and as asset with capital gains for the latter, but not the former.

We, of course, are not tax consultants, so that might not be fully correct, but the addition of BCH to Purse would be the latest sign that the currency is rapidly growing in merchants adoption.

They dream of a decentralized currency which can not be just inflated away, but instead has fixed supply, acting like gold, yet unlike gold is easily transportable, can be used on the internet, can move in seconds, for as good as zero fees, in a peer to peer manner, across the globe.

It is in many ways a radical idea, with strong intellectual backing, especially by conservatives and free market supporters, so implementing the insight of a Nobel Laureate in Economics, Friedrich Hayek:

“The past instability of the market economy is the consequence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process… only competition in a free market can take account of all the circumstances which ought to be taken account of.” Hayek in The Denationalization of Money.

That has given it the name of the people’s money, for it is directly controlled by the many through numerous local decisions closest to them in deciding which currency to use, rather than by the few through a small committee far away from those affected by their decisions.

As such, the primary aim of Bitcoin Cash supporters is to increase merchant adoption, with their dream being to the entire world, so that they can use it as a currency, in potentially the biggest experiment since Marco Polo brought paper money.