Silicon Valley may be on target to stop credit card hacking, according to multiple reports on social media.
The hack over the holiday shopping season may have involved 40 million shoppers, across a wide swath of retailers.
According to a source who recently spoke with one of the head of Google Wallet, Sridhar Ramaswamy, the company could be working on adding Bitcoin to its payment system. The source suggested Google is gauging interest in the crypto-currency, according to Benzinga.com.
Google Wallet — the search giant’s smartphone banking app — is asking users their interest in being able to use bitcoin as a payment option.
Analysts think that the digital currency’s future lies in the payments business, a $500 billion dollar industry for tradition financial institutions like JP Morgan and Visa, according to Benzinga.
The problem with debit and credit card technology is that, while effective, it is very slow, inefficient, and vulnerable to hacks and cyberattacks. Bitcoin, while it has many problems of its own, solves a number of the issues the outdated payment technology has struggled to overcome.
Major companies like overstock.com have been accepting Bitcoin as payment, and companies like Zynga, eBay, and Paypal have been following suit.
Thursday in Davos, Switzerland Treasury Secretary Jack Lew gave the crypto currency a nod of approval by saying it’s a “phenomenon,” but also questioned whether Bitcoin’s “ anonymous form of transaction. And it offers places for people to hide,” could be trouble.
“From the government’s perspective, we have to make sure [bitcoin] does not become avenue to funding illegal activities or to funding activities that have malign purposes like terrorist activities,” Lew added.