Amazon gift cards are marketplace specific. You can't buy a gift card in the UK and use it in the US.

That's a restriction placed by Amazon itself. They could remove it tomorrow if they wanted to, and doing so would be a lot easier than creating their own currency.

Gift card balances are liabilities on the balance sheet of each country or regional office in which that card is valid. From a software standpoint it probably isn't much more than a flick of a switch. From a financial reconcialiation point of view however....

Not so fast.

If they allow that with USD et al, they're more liable in more "currently on the books" ways than if they started letting people send Ama-coin across the globe.

I'm sure they'd want nothing more than to be able to pay their employees with amazon gift cards so the only place they can spend their earnings is at the company store.

I don't doubt that they love the company store model. I've been offered AWS credits in lieu of cash for contract work.... after the cash amount was agreed to in writing and work was performed.

how would the worker pay their taxes, if amazon did that? Presumably, the US gov't will not accept amazon gift-card in lieu of cash.

You think most Amazon warehouse workers make enough to pay taxes?

Don't a lot of mechanical turk workers get paid in gift cards?