As we first reported in EcommerceBytes, eBay filed a patent application incorporating Bitcoin, and eBay CEO John Donahoe revealed the company is considering integrating Bitcoin into PayPal. Over at Bitcoin Magazine we were the first to report on eBay's so called Gift Token patent filing.



While eBay has been flirting with Bitcoin, one has to wonder what plans if any, Amazon has in store for everyone's favorite cryptocurrency? CEO of Overstock.com Patrick Byrne has gone on record saying Amazon will have no choice but to accept Bitcoin.



Overstock.com itself began accepting Bitcoin shortly after his interview with News BTC late last year. Mr. Byrne was the keynote speaker at "Bitcoin 2014" this month and boldly claimed that Overstock.com, which is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, is mulling a dual listing for his company's shares on decentralized exchange on the Bitcoin Blockchain e.g. CounterParty.



While Amazon doesn't appear to be in any hurry to offer Bitcoin on its marketplace, it was awarded a patent that includes Bitcoin as a funding source for its cloud computing services, known as AWS. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted patent 8,719,131, "Allocating financial risk and reward in a multi-tenant environment," to Amazon Technologies, Inc. The patent was originally filed on March 29th, 2012.



The patent appears to be a flexible pay-per-use cloud computing scheme that Amazon could integrate into AWS. The patent covers a broad range of uses including allowing for "anonymously spawned" frictionless pay-per-use resource allocation as well as a crowdsourcing fundraising mechanisms to provide access to these resources.



Users would get access to Amazon services without having to provide their private credentials such as credit card number and home address in part by paying for services with Bitcoin.



Here's the background from the patent filing:



As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.



In many cases, the costs of running a Web site, application, or other offering using these resources can become significant when many users utilize these offerings. Conventional approaches to funding these offerings can be somewhat limited, and in some cases can result in the offering no longer being available when an owner of a resource cannot afford to maintain an offering. Further, sometimes a customer only needs a resource for a specific task or period of time, and conventional approaches to obtaining the resources whereby a user must obtain an account, set up a resource usage schedule, and perform other such tasks can decrease the efficiency of various processes.



And here is an extract from the Patent mentioning Bitcoin:



"... where the request is to perform a single task, the user may not even have to provide any type of identity signing a request, user credentials, or other such identifying information. As an example, a user might submit a request to obtain dedicated access to an application server instance for a period of two hours, and can provide digital cash with the request in the amount needed for the requested two hour period of time. Various types of digital cash, electronic money, or crypto-currency can be used, such as Bitcoins provided by the Bitcoin P2P Currency System…Requests received with digital cash ...can be completely anonymous donations."



Do you think Amazon is planning to fully embrace Bitcoin? Let us know below!



About the Author

Brian Cohen has been an active member of the eBay community since May 1998, and he currently trades under the member name Bidofthis.com. His first AuctionBytes article was published in May 2002. Brian's reporting on Bitcoin in 2013 has been referenced in numerous publications including The Register, Tech Week Europe, TechCrunch and PC World. Brian can be contacted through his website at BidofThis.com where he always has a "little Bid of This and little Bid of That."

