Bitcoin payments to be enabled by PayPal and Coinbase

PayPal Bitcoin payments have been in the works since the announcement of the OneTouch mobile payment solution a month ago. Today, OneTouch has gone live and any PayPal app user will have access to mobile payments from now on.

Paypal will supposedly partner with Coinbase in order to effectively design a platform that will allow the OneTouch mobile payment solution to incorporate Bitcoin payments. The new Bitcoin service will be made available through Braintree, the company that has developed OneTouch. Bitcoin payments will be handled by Braintree’s new system, and those will only be possible with Coinbase wallet-holders.

At least that’s what PayPal is planning when it comes to Bitcoin. The fact that PayPal is actually considering Bitcoin as a form of payment and thinking of implementing it in its mobile payment service tells us a lot about how much Bitcoin and the concept of e-money have evolved. OneTouch was the first step when it comes to widespread implementation of online payment system. OneTouch is a service that can be embedded in a program and it offers you the possibility of payment via credit card or the likes, directly from your phone.

OneTouch can deal with cash at the moment, but a Bitcoin payment is going to be implemented after PayPal enters a partnership with Coinbase. Coinbase is a Bitcoin wallet that allows you to securely buy, use and accept Bitcoin currency. Currently, one Bitcoin is worth $469.39, which means that you can buy one Bitcoin with that amount and later use that single Bitcoin to buy something else from the companies that accept Bitcoin as a valid currency.

With Apple’s upcoming release of a mobile payment platform based on NFC, surely interest will peek in PayPal’s endeavor, too. Since both companies are pushing mobile payments forward, one must wonder whether we need this development. Fact of the matter is, we don’t. Most people are comfortable with online shopping as it is right now. Mobile payments are much more of a commodity, than a necessity. In my opinion, this coincidence between Apple’s announcement of its mobile payment platform and PayPal’s implementation of one and announcement of another points towards a new development in finance.

Mobile payments will be helpful in our daily lives and the introduction of Bitcoin will also be a favorable development of internet financing. The question will it be safe? remains, though. We don’t feel safe letting our PC know our credit card number and we don’t even feel safe with the bank knowing our account number. Will the mobile payments era add to this sense of insecurity or will it diminish it?

In any case, mobile payments are here and Bitcoin is getting popular around the world, so we might be looking forward to a 2015 pegged as the year everybody used NFC to trade Bitcoins. That’s a funny sounding headline if you compared to those of 5 years ago, but it demonstrates how much technology and human kind have advanced and how each and every company and person tries to make the better of the current situation.

PayPal’s attempt at mobile payments surely comes as a safety measure against Apple’s new technology and introducing Bitcoins to the story just adds to the mystery surrounding our future, connected.