Amazon has been granted a patent which mentions the possible use of Bitcoin by the company, CoinDesk reported yesterday. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could be used by Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing platform, to accept payments.

This is in contrast to the earlier claims made by Amazon’s head of payments, Tom Taylor, who said that the company didn’t have any plans to immediately accept Bitcoin. But in the already mentioned patent, we read:

Various types of digital cash, electronic money, or crypto-currency can be used, such as Bitcoins provided by the Bitcoin P2P Currency System.

The patent was filed two years ago. It doesn’t necessarily have to indicate that Amazon will be accepting Bitcoin anytime soon since the mention of virtual currency is only a very small part of the overall patent.

On the other hand, this might indicate that Amazon doesn’t rule out future integration of cryptocurrencies should they gain customer awareness. If increasing numbers of customers ask for the possibility of payment in Bitcoin, Amazon might actually make use of Bitcoin. This is, however, not the case just now.