Another milestone for bitcoin

APMEX is one of the world’s largest precious metal retailers. It is a private company with sales totaling to billions of dollars every year. The company was founded by Scott Thomas, who formed the American Precious Metals Exchange, which later was shortened to APMEX. The company offers more than 10,000 precious metals from various different mints and ships, to more than 80 countries all over the globe.
Danish Yasin

Published on Dec 14, 2017 10:21 By Danish Yasin

APMEX is one of the world’s largest precious metal retailers. It is a private company with sales totaling to billions of dollars every year. The company was founded by Scott Thomas, who formed the American Precious Metals Exchange, which later was shortened to APMEX. The company offers more than 10,000 precious metals from various different mints and ships, to more than 80 countries all over the globe.

Last week on the 6th of December, APMEX announced that it will start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment with the help of Bitpay. The cryptocurrency exchange will act as a mediator between APMEX and its crypto-enthusiast customers. Now, customers can purchase precious metals, such as gold and silver, using bitcoins and other altcoins.

This is a commendable milestone for Bitcoin in its effort to be recognized as a legitimate, global payment solution that can used without interference from different government bodies. As cryptocurrencies do not follow the route of traditional fiat currencies, they are cheaper to process. The lack of middlemen does cause a serious problem when it comes to tracing the transactions. However, this problem may be remedied with the help of new legislation forcing exchanges to collect information from their customers before they purchase cryptocurrency.

APMEX is offering a 4% discount to those customers who chose to pay through cryptocurrency. While explaining their decision to accept cryptocurrency, they explained that it is just so much more convenient than traditional form of payments. Moreover, they received a lot of requests from their customers to begin this service.

This is what APMEX had to say regarding their decision:

“International orders become significantly easier as cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are accepted worldwide without conversion. Also, many customers prefer bitcoin payments because of the anonymity offered by a blockchain purchase.”

Their decision does not come as a surprise, as the recent growth in Bitcoin’s market share has made it a hot trend. Many are retracting their previous statements where they criticized bitcoin and called it a sham.

APMEX is not the first of the precious metal buyers to use cryptocurrency. JM Bullion, Amagi Metals, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage and numerous other competitors of APMEX, have all started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment.