Weedmaps.com Founder Doesn't Think Bitcoin Is What Marijuana Industry Needs

A multibillion-dollar, "legal" industry like Medical Marijuana, whose network is spread across 23 US states and the District of Columbia, is still deprived of the very basic thing any industry would need - a banking system. According to a report by Jeffrey Stinson of The Pew Charitable Trust, the cannabis centers all across the United States are finding it hard to obtain even a simple banking facility. "The abundance of cash makes the country's 2,000 retail shops and medical dispensaries tantalizing targets for criminals," the report reveals. "Without bank accounts, legal marijuana....

The cannabis industry in the United States may soon face a ban on cryptocurrency usage. Marijuana, the wonder plant as some call it is going through a liberation phase in the United States. In 37 out of 50 states have relaxed the laws regarding the sale and use of marijuana and its derivatives in the past few years. Most of these states approve of the medical use of marijuana while a handful also makes an exception for recreational use. But these relaxations come with riders to make it difficult for businesses dealing with cannabis. According to reports, Senators Steve Conway and Ann....

Trees, a California-based medical marijuana distributor, recently has proposed the idea of delivering marijuana kits by air. An idea that certainly is novel and could end up being one that innovates the industry as it becomes more commercialized. The company currently only serves the San Francisco Bay area and accepts Bitcoin as well as more traditional forms of payment through online bank transfers, cash, and credit cards. Marijuana for recreational use is illegal in California, and thus only accepts purchases from people holding medical recommendations by certified doctors. In order to....

It is no secret that the medical marijuana industry in the United States faces an uphill struggle, indeed our readers will remember that we covered the issue in detail recently and discussed how dependence on cash is putting both medical marijuana businesses as well as consumers at a great deal of risk. It is interesting to note that there have been developments in this field and there is now a payments solution at hand for regulated medical marijuana businesses as well as customers. CanPay has recently announced a solution for the legal marijuana industry that has become available to....

Ann Rivers, a Washington State senator, introduced a bill last week to ban the use of Bitcoin in purchasing or selling marijuana-related products. Rivers claims that Bitcoin isn’t transparent enough to be used as the underlying currency of the marijuana industry. She noted in the bill that Bitcoin does not have an actual value recognized by the US government. The bill reads: “‘Virtual currency’ does not include the software or protocols governing the transfer of the digital representation of value or other uses of virtual distributed ledger systems to verify ownership or authenticity in a....