Welcome to the internet age. Where anyone can post a catchy title and influence readers that are lazy or choose not to do their due diligence. Which, in this case, would have been as simple as clicking and reading the baseless article. You’d be surprised to find out how frequently people share and repost links without even reading them.

This morning an article on Squawker started going viral on social media with the title “BREAKING: Amazon Will Accept Bitcoin By October”. Seems like a pretty clear statement right? Well, not so much.  If you read the article you would see who and what the source of this claim is.

The source is James Altucher, who has recently been spending loads of money on Facebook ads in order to brand himself as a crypto “mastermind” according to the class he is offering.  While James may have a pretty extensive background in finance among other fields, it would be a farfetched claim to call him a crypto expert.

What more? Take a look below at the clip from the actual source (The James Altucher Report) by which the Squawker claim is based solely upon.

You know, now that I think about it, Amazon “could” do anything.

I’m not saying Amazon will never accept bitcoin, however, I find it quite unlikely that they will jeopardize their already incredibly thin margins on a highly fluctuating cryptocurrency. Could you imagine the earnings call where Amazon executives tried to explain why they didn’t hit their targets based on a move in the price of bitcoin during the quarter?

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Peter is a senior at Ohio State University majoring in finance. He has recently taken an extreme interest in cryptocurrencies, yet remains skeptical of a lot of the alt coins. In his free time, he enjoys golfing and playing League of Legends. As of October 4, 2017, Peter successfully completed his goal of turning $1000 into $25,000 by trading cryptocurrencies which he set out to achieve in March 2016.