This effectively means that anyplace you can type text becomes a potential storefront.

Before customers have even closed your book, they can already have ordered the next book in the series.

I've been wondering lately about whether bitcoin could make Amazon unnecessary. Here are my thoughts on the subject.If you've never heard of Bitcoin, it's basically the e-mail of money. You get yourself a bitcoin wallet program, which can either be an online program hosted by a company (like the bitcoin equivalent of gmail) or you download a wallet program to your home computer (like Outlook Express). Whichever method you choose, you get to create a "bitcoin address" for yourself which works like an e-mail address, except that you receive money instead of messages. A bitcoin address looks like this: 19v5V5P9infaQyCaRxWWeWoHnRbkX684PS. (This is for a Pet Rescue site.) So if you wanted to send money to this bitcoin address, you would basically just pop open your money-email program and hit send. The money appears in the recipient's "money inbox" in a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the sum you send. As for transaction fees, they are so minimal as to be nearly nonexistent--we are talking on the order of pennies. This makes it practically to send $0.99 to someone and not have the money eaten up in transaction fees.The really neat thing about bitcoin addresses, though, is that they are just a line of text. You could post one anywhere--in your forum signature, at the end of your book, in your mailing list, your tweet, or on your author webpage. Anywhere you can put an e-mail address, you can put a bitcoin address.Now let's ask ourselves: why do we sell our books on Amazon, and not on Goodreads or Twitter or Wattpad or our website any other site that offers free exposure for your book? Well, duh. Because Amazon has a big, fat "Buy" button and those other sites don't. But with bitcoin these other sites become storefronts--anywhere you can type your e-mail, you can type your money e-mail. This means that readers can buy direct from Goodreads or Wattpad--no need to go to Amazon at all. What's more, bitcoin enables "one click" purchases everywhere. You don't have to go through the hassle of registering up for an account or worrying about giving your credit card information to some stranger--all you need is your bitcoin address. Needless to say, this makes it much more feasible to sell direct from your website. In fact, if you can get your first readers to buy book 1 on Amazon, you could quite possibly get them to buy the next three books directly from your website via bitcoin and it would be just as convenient. Better yet, you could just put a bitcoin address on the last page of your e-book with the message "Buy book 2 here for $2.99 (bitcoin address)"Now that's direct marketing. You could also sell directly to your newsletter subscribers by including a bitcoin address in your new book announcement. Heck, why not sell from Goodreads or Facebook or Twitter, for that matter? Remind me why we need Amazon, again?Bitcoin could be very good news for serials. Let's say you want to run a serial where you promise to unlock each new chapter when your readers have collectively paid $50. With credit cards or Paypal, it would be impossible to tell how much had been donated, and thus your customers would have no way of knowing whether you were ripping them off or not. Well, with bitcoin that worry is gone. Due to the nature of the bitcoin architecture, the amount of money in every single bitcoin address in the world can be viewed online for free, so a customer can verify how much money has been donated to the author. No cheating possible, and customers can trust that they are getting what they paid for.Those who are marketing books to children and younger teenagers also have something to gain by bitcoin adoption. Traditionally, it has been the case that authors had to market their books to young purchaser's parents, because after all, mom and dad are the one with the credit card. But there is nothing stopping a youngster from getting a bitcoin address anymore than an email address. Would parents trust their kids with bitcoin? Sure, because a.) in-app game purchases; and b.) what happens when Johnny forgets his field trip money/lunch money and needs it sent over to school immediately? With a credit card it would take days to arrive; with bitcoin, it takes minutes. What's more, bitcoin is not like a credit card, where you can overdraw and go into debt. If there's no money in your bitcoin address, you can't make purchases. Period. So that makes it safe for kids who want digital purchasing power. What this means is that kids who have their allowance in bitcoin can now buy books directly from authors. This would significantly change the marketing paradigm, I think. Bitcoin will open up opportunities for a younger audience who would previously have been unable to buy books simply because of the inherent barriers of e-commerce.Another thing that bitcoin enables is foreign sales. Email is universal; you can send an e-mail to someone in (say) China for free without any consideration of borders or sale tax or the like. Bitcoin operates on exactly the same principle. If a seven year old Iranian kid wants to buy your book, now they can. Bitcoin is as universal as the internet itself; national barriers are no longer sales barriers. What's more, transaction fees will be on the order of a penny, no matter how distant the customer you are dealing with. And there's no sales tax, though this may cause issues come tax time.This is all in the future, but I think it will start in the next few years. The only piece of technology that is missing in my scenarios is a bitcoin autoresponder program that will send the customer their purchase upon the receipt of the correct amount of money. However, I don't think this is a big deal technologically. You can already append a little message to a bitcoin payment, so it's technically feasible--if awkward--to accept $4.99 in bitcoin from a customer and then send back a $0.01 payment with an attached message containing the URL download link for your book. The capability is there, but it hasn't been streamlined and exploited yet. When bitcoin starts getting mass adoption, then I am confident we will see such conveniences added to the program.Good news, hey?I'm looking forward to the future.