AMC says it will accept bitcoin as payment for movie tickets

[Frank Cox]

AMC Entertainment said Monday it will start accepting bitcoin as payment for movie tickets and concessions if purchased online at all of its U.S. theaters.

CEO Adam Aron said during an earnings call Monday that the movie theater chain will have the IT systems in place to take the cryptocurrency as payment by the end of 2021.

I don't even take credit cards at my theatre. Guess I'm even further behind the times than I thought.

[Leo Enticknap]

And he's done this just as the Infrastructure Bill passed the Senate, which contains new tax reporting requirements on cryptocurrencies that the measure's opponents claim will make them legally unusable.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, with an average transaction fee of $23 per transaction fee, that sounds about right up their ally.

I'm not saying that the idea behind cryptocurrencies is entirely useless, but the implementation known as Bitcoin certainly is. With a maximum of 3 transactions per second globally, an average block confirmation time of 10 minutes and average energy cost of more than 850 kWh per transaction, this thing will not scale as a serious payment platform...

[Randy Stankey]

I just don't like the idea that some random organization can handle money and do other things that banks do but without rules to protect customers like banks have to obey.
They can literally close up shop and say, "Sorry, we're out of business." All the people who have invested in them are shit out of luck and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
Those assholes will be sitting on their yachts, drinking champagne while other people go bankrupt at their expense.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Well, the idea behind a good cryptocurrency is that nobody really owns it and nobody can call the quits on it. Yeah, there are a lot of crypto-scams out there, but that seems to be the nature of anything having to do with money, as scams are literally everywhere and in any business.

I don't know if I'd call Bitcoin a scam, but it feels close to a pyramid scheme. I don't know if that was the intention of it al or if it is a long-running experiment that somehow got hijacked. But, those who got in early now have amassed an enormous wealth "on paper", and the virtual value of this can only be sustained by hooking up new "customers" who buy into it. But you'll find hordes of "crypto investors" who'll tell you that fiat currency isn't anything different, only that it's controlled by big, central banks. In a well-implemented crypto-coin scheme, those central entities shouldn't exist, the system should self-regulate.

The biggest problem I have with many if not most of those "crypto schemes", though, is how money is created and how much energy is wasted on something that eventually only scales to something like 3 transactions a second.

Still, I think it should be possible to design cryptographic "coins" that don't need "mining farms" full with crypto-hashers to validate transactions, something that takes the distributed ledger approach and finds "truth" via a less wasteful way. Self-regulation by machine will be the hard part. It's near-impossible to design a "perfect" system and you'll always find people trying to game the system. If there isn't a "central agency" to counteract this kind of foul play, then you'll eventually see that the affected "coin" will succumb under those who game the system. In my opinion, that's exactly what happened to Bitcoin and that's why it just isn't viable as a digital payment infrastructure.

[Martin McCaffery]

the measure's opponents claim will make them legally unusable.

Thought the whole purpose of crypto currencies was to use them to do illegal things.

[Frank Cox]

Pretty much, as far as I can see. Ransomware and money laundering seem to be the top uses, along with things like lists of stolen credit card numbers and drug purchases on "dark markets".

Now you can get a movie ticket while you're hiring a hitman.

I really don't see this as anything more than a way to pander to the same crowd that powered the Robin Hood Rally in AMC's stock.

"Hey everybody, look how cool and hip we are! Bitcoin! Bitcoin! Bitcoin! And did we mention that we're cool!"

[James Biggins]

I can see Bitcoin going the way of The South Sea Bubble.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Thought the whole purpose of crypto currencies was to use them to do illegal things.

Well... What some of those criminals seemingly forgot is that their entire transaction ledger is public knowledge...

Now you can get a movie ticket while you're hiring a hitman.

You can do the same with cash, probably with a higher success rate, because, even without being a specialist in neither bitcoin nor contract killings, I'm pretty sure every hitman worth their coin, still wants to be paid in totally uncool yet cold, hard cash.

[Martin McCaffery]

I can see Bitcoin going the way of The South Sea Bubble.

Tulips!

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[Marcel Birgelen]

Tulips!

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You see what you get when you start promoting pump and dump activities.

[Mark Lane]

"I don't even take credit cards at my theatre. Guess I'm even further behind the times than I thought."

I'm with you Frank. We are a cash only business too.. although we do have a few customers who pay with farm fresh eggs and backed goods.

[Allan Young]

"I don't even take credit cards at my theatre. Guess I'm even further behind the times than I thought."

I'm with you Frank. We are a cash only business too.. although we do have a few customers who pay with farm fresh eggs and backed goods.

Is there any particular reason for holding out on accepting card payments? I can't imagine it's an issue of cost these days - the readers are dirt cheap (and in some cases, free) and the commission rates are only around the 2% mark. Don't the benefits of accepting cards now outweigh the hassle involved with cash transactions (schlepping regularly to the bank, for instance)?

About the only reason for remaining cash-only I can think of is lack of a decent WiFi or cellular data connection to process the payments, but maybe I'm missing something.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Many governments around the planet are pushing hard to eradicate cash entirely, as they see it as the bad stuff, the stuff they don't have total control over, a lot like cryptocurrency.

[Frank Cox]

For me it's the service charges. Someone comes in and buys his ticket. Runs the card. Moves over a few feet and buys his popcorn. Runs the card. Goes into watch the movie, comes back out partway to get another drink. Runs the card. His kid wants a candy bar, so he's back again to run the card. And I'm paying a service charge every single time, so to make up for the average service charges I'd have to raise my admission prices by about $2 or start charging 50 cents more for the popcorn and drinks. Nothing would be accomplished other than making my customers pay more; I'd end up with the same thing I have now at the end of the night. I don't see a win here.

Everyone around here knows that they have to bring cash when they come to the show, and if they didn't know before they find out fairly quickly when they get here. There's a bank with an atm on the corner, so it's just a half-block away and it's not hard for people to just zip down there to get some cash.

No hassling around with broken or nsf cards this way either. "That didn't work? Try this one. No? What about this one? Or maybe this one?" Meanwhile people are waiting behind this guy....

It's easy to avoid all of these service charges and hassling around. Someone walks in and hands me a $20 bill. I give him his change. Done.