US Patent Office (USPTO) has given Square, an online payment operator, an approval to create a network in which merchants can make settlements in virtual coins along with fiat money.
Crypto payment predecessors
Square is not the only company that lets entrepreneurs take money for their goods in virtual coins and that can be changed into the local fiat money automatically. BitPay has been doing it with Bitcoin for seven years already, working with BTC payments.
One difference is that Square has got a great number of customers already, so this should help the company to handle the new option well adding it to its POS system. Its customers will not have to use any third-parties to pay in crypto for the goods they have chosen.
Getting rid of transaction latency
The POS system of Square also allows working without latency when conducting crypto operations, in this case, BTC transactions can be verified within an approximately the same time period that takes a bank card transaction.
Transactions will be recorded on an isolated blockchain from wallets run by Square in the real-time mode. This will enable the POS system to recognize the changed balances and only after that the transactions will be fixed on the public blockchain. Unfortunately, the patent warns that this still leaves a change for double spending. However, this risk will be transferred from the seller to the payment company.
Will it actually be done?
There is certainly a risk that Square simply will not apply its patent deciding not to mess with virtual currencies if it considers that the new type of money is just a waste of time, as it happened with Bank of America that spent a lot of time toying with the idea of crypto payments but then gave it up not believing in its future.
However, Jack Dorsey, the Square CEO, actually reckons that Bitcoin could turn into a common payment option on the Web within the next ten years.
Alex Dovbnya
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin