Bitcoin Beat Apple Pay? Marc Andreessen Thinks So

On the surface, it’s not hard to believe that Apple Pay is beating Bitcoin.

After all, Apple Pay is accepted at a whole lot more places, and has a generally wider install base thanks to that oh-so-popular Apple connection. So how could Bitcoin beat a service that has not only more users but more user-welcome venues to its credit?

Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder and famed tech investor, thinks he may have just the answer.

Andreessen hit the Dreamforce conference back in October to somewhat lay the groundwork for this controversial projection, suggesting that Bitcoin was to “…have a big impact over the next 20 years.” That doesn’t mean so much in and of itself, but Andreessen soon followed up by noting that Apple Pay was “…merely consistent with the status quo,” and that Apple CEO Tim Cook’s projections that Apple Pay was an entirely new payment platform weren’t quite meshing with the future.

Andreessen, some project, has a point. After all, Bitcoin is a wholly anonymous payment source, unlike Apple Pay and its breed, and while anonymous currencies can be used for illegal transactions, so too can the same be readily used for legal ones, as cash has shown for hundreds if not thousands of years.

What’s more, an anonymized currency can go quite some way in protecting against data breaches; what point in pursuing customer records and personally identifiable information when neither are particularly necessary to carry out a transaction, if such are even present in the system to begin with?

Just to top it off, bitcoin can be used in a variety of different platforms, be it online or mobile, while Apple Pay is limited to just Apple devices. There’s even a certain amount of backing to Bitcoin; there will only be so many ever made thanks to the nature of the algorithm involved in the generation of said currency.

Yet at the same time, bitcoin’s value has fluctuated wildly over the course of the last few years, and that doesn’t make for a great platform from which to buy and sell goods. Just ask anyone who lived in Zimbabwe in around 2008, when inflation hit an estimated 79.6 billion percent. While Bitcoin has never been that bad, the end result is no less difficult an environment for merchants and consumers alike.

There’s some word that exchanges will help stabilize bitcoin values, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. Pulling one of the biggest problems the currency faces out of the equation certainly can’t hurt, and that improves the likelihood of positive results. While Andreessen may not be right on the money, so to speak, with this projection, the problems with Bitcoin are well known, and if such problems are fixed, then that goes a long way toward taking care of business.