I meet quite a lot of people who understand the meaning of bitcoin but don't want to pay with it. They are fans of bitcoin, they try to have as much of it as possible, but they don't want to use it to pay for various reasons. This may sound logical to you, but I believe that there is often a flawed reasoning behind it.

There are many reasons not to pay with bitcoin

  1. Don't know how to account for the transactions or don't want to pay additional taxes?
    Changing terms and unfair rules are annoying. I understand if such complications deter you from paying. However, bitcoin was created so that you no longer have to ask anyone for permission.
  2. No place to pay?
    The number of places where one can pay is slowly increasing. But nowadays, I would say it's more of a lack of demand from customers. If this is still the reason, let your merchants know. Look at map and use bitcoin where you can.
  3. Is it inconvenient?
    Using bitcoin is getting easier every day. New tools are being created all the time. However, if you don't feel like exploring different apps or it's too much work for you for some other reason, you may not be ready to pay with bitcoin yet.
  4. Are you concerned about volatility?
    It is not desirable for prices to be fixed, but it is true that too much volatility can be uncomfortable. Sometimes you pay a little more, sometimes a little less. Mentally it can be unpleasant at first, but over time you speculate less and less. Short-term fluctuations are irrelevant in the long run.
  5. Are you low on bitcoin?
    This common problem can be solved, for example, by simply buying more bitcoin.
  6. Does it cost too much to get bitcoin?
    If you save something in bitcoin once in a while, that cost still exists. The only question left is how much bitcoin to acquire.

How to acquire bitcoin for a fixed or even no fee

We often also pay a fee expressed as a percentage from the exchange of fiat for bitcoin. So if you buy more bitcoin, you also pay a larger fee. Figuratively, this fee makes it more expensive to potentially pay with bitcoin. However, you still have several options to avoid such a fee.
  1. Be paid with bitcoin
    Try asking your employer, or find a new job at stacker.news
  2. Offer goods and services for bitcoin
    Whenever you sell something, you can demand bitcoin again. Whether you're settling bills with friends for payment at lunch or offering goods at a marketplace. You can always use bitcoin.
  3. Try bitcoin mining
    If you have spare capital, you can invest in mining machines to earn a regular bitcoin income.
  4. Find a bitcoiner
    Join a community in your area and meet other bitcoiners. You might find a person who already has bitcoin income and will be happy to exchange some of it for you - at least until they can pay everywhere with bitcoin.
  5. Export for a fixed fee
    Similarly, you can vexl with the Vexl app. You can try to demand a fixed-fee exchange so that a larger purchase doesn't represent an additional cost to you.
There are a lot of reasons not to pay with bitcoin, and few people can overcome them painlessly. So in these cases, I can understand why you don't pay with bitcoin.

Gresham's Law is not a good reason to use fiat

But you may have also heard that bitcoin is better than fiat, so you'll save it and get rid of the worse money → i.e. fiat. This phenomenon is known as Gresham's Law, although it was probably first enunciated by Nicolas Copernicus.
I have the impression that this principle has made at least one halving generation a little crazy with the notion of HODL. The idea of HODL is that you don't speculate, play slots and buy shitcoins. It could also be loosely interpreted as be thrifty. But sometimes you still need to buy something - like food, for example. Under the Gresham's Law interpretation, you should pay with the worst money you have. Such grain could be used to pay, and in many countries it still has a worse ability to hold value than fiat. Still, you'd rather pay with fiat.

Why don't you pay with grain?

Again, you probably have several reasons.
  1. You don't carry grain with you
    Not only do you not carry it with you. First of all, you don't want to store it. You don't even want to speculate on the price of grain. Grain is simply worse money, so you don't want to have it in the first place. Nor do you want to hold fiat if you come to the conclusion that it's worse money than bitcoin. That view doesn't have to be all or nothing. Feel free to have some grain, but don't tell me you want to use it for payment. That only applies in the very short term when you need to get rid of it.
  2. Traders accepting grain are weird
    Even the method of payment can reveal something about the merchant. What would you think of a person today who gets paid in grain? If someone demands an outdated form of payment, you can easily be put off. Conversely, a business with new options can become a love brand for people.
  3. Paying with grain is insulting
    You are showing that you don't respect the merchant by offering an inferior form of payment.
  4. No one accepts grain anymore
    Today, virtually no merchant will accept grain as payment. In fact, the so-called Thiers Law works in exactly the opposite direction against Gresham's Law. This basically says that even a merchant has his limits and if the money offered is too bad, he will simply refuse it. Whoever has grain ready for payment at that time will not pay with it anywhere. Fortunately, he could at least use it for consumption. But what do you do with a worthless fiat?

Don't regret spending bitcoins

Imagine buying two pizzas many years ago and paying with bitcoin. If you had done it like Laszlo Hanyecz did on May 22, 2010, it would have cost you a total of 10,000 bitcoins. As of August 14, 2023, you could have 2,940,000,000 USD instead. (Almost three billion 😱)
Would you be sorry you used bitcoin to do it back then? In his own words, Laszlo Hanyecz never regretted it because the pizza was really good. I used to think he was just bragging, but it must bother him now. Nowadays, I practically don't see why paying with bitcoin should bother him directly.
If we regret spending bitcoin, it's usually because we expect its value to increase. However, the payment itself is just a transfer of value, and from that perspective it doesn't matter what form we use. Laszlo simply spent the value of two pizzas. In the same way, he might regret every crown he did not exchange for bitcoin that day. Since it's abstract, it makes us feel less angry, but in the same way that Laszlo lost money years ago, so did all the people in the world who didn't buy bitcoin that day. The only difference is that we don't know their names.

Why pay with bitcoin instead

  1. Better privacy than credit cards
    Your bank account information is not private. You never know who is watching all your transactions. Bitcoin payments via Ligthning Network are not perfect in this respect either, but the level of privacy is very high.
  2. Building an efficient and moral ecosystem
    For example, during the covid, a lot of businesses were banned from doing business. You may find this justifiable, but you may not agree in all cases. Bitcoin allows you to cooperate even when someone doesn't like it. The more people know how to use bitcoin, the more options you will have. Every payment you make supports this free network.
  3. Meeting interesting people
    Bitcoiners are often very intelligent and inspiring people. Since bitcoin payments are still very rare, virtually every time you make a payment there will be a new conversation, again cementing you in a growing community.
  4. Trying new technologies
    Maybe you like to play around. Bitcoin payments are a very dynamic environment. New tools are constantly being created. You can participate directly or at least be among the first to try them out. With bitcoin, for example, you can pay with QR codes, NFC cards, rings and other chips, or send a payment to a phone number or email address.
  5. You can hold more bitcoin
    If you pay with bitcoin, you won't need as much depreciating fiat. That way, it will also pay off in the long run.

Conclusion

Don't get me wrong. Bitcoin is free money, so you can do whatever you want with it. Feel free not to use it. But I wanted to point out a pretty simple idea that if you want to have relatively more bitcoin in the long run compared to fiat, you have to use it for payments as well. Otherwise you are forced to have too much depreciating fiat all the time. There are lots of reasons not to pay with bitcoin, but it's not that bitcoin is too good for that. On the other hand, there are already plenty of good reasons to pay with bitcoin. If you're ready to try bitcoin, join the Twenty-One world community.
Since it is not possible to edit posts here, you can find the latest version on my GitHub
100% agree! Good points. I will add to "why to pay with bitcoin":
  • fuck the banksters and govs
  • fiat delenda est
  • every time you pay with btc a merchant, you are weakening the fiat and empower that merchant, you encourage him to save more.
  • every time you pay in btc you make it stronger because will circulate faster and not going back into speculative ecchanges.
Disclaimer: I live on bitcoin standard from 2018. Closed all my bank accounts. Earn in btc, spend in btc, hold in btc. Is not that impossible if you really want to do it. All depends on your willing to get the fuck out from fiat.
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When you initially have a large amount of bitcoins that you acquired in the early 10s, it is much easier to switch to the bitcoin standard and advise others to do so.
But there are a lot more people for whom that advice won't make life easier. You have to put a lot of effort into earning any bitcoins now.
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You still have fiat in a bank account? Why do you look to earn pennies (aka SN)? Work and be paid in btc. Stop keeping fiat in a bank. People that still have fiat in a bank acc are just fiat maxis.
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No, you can have fiat because you need to have a value that do not fluctuate a lot in value in a specific period and still receive yield in bitcoin on dollar deposits in https://www.xapobank.com/ for example, that is a pro bitcoin bank.
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Fiat mindset is a disease. You NGMI
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You can at least have fiat but receive the yield from dollar deposits in bitcoin using a pro bitcoin bank like https://www.xapobank.com/
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Great post. We all should spend Bitcoin. Many Bitcoin users don't have enough foresight to understand the mid to long term consequences of not spending from their stack, in terms of the lost opportunity to kick-start a thriving bitcoin circular economy.
I just want to point to a minor issue, basically a confusion I see people repeating almost everywhere: Gresham's Law is enunciated in the context where you have two different physical coins with the same face value but different contents of valuable metal. The "bad money drives out good money" can only be understood properly in that context.
Imagine I make a coin that contains 1g of gold and I name it a Hal. I put Hal Finney's face on it, and everyone starts using them across the economy. People price things in Hals, salaries are denominated in Hals, etc.
10 years after, and doing what any sneaky politician would, I decide to fuck around with the mint. I make a new batch of Hals, but this time I put 0.9g of gold instead of 1g.
In the lenses of Gresham's law, the first Hal is the good money, and the second Hal is the bad money. The relative distinction comes from the difference in face value and content value. The trick comes from the confusion in prices in the economy: since everyone is used to price things in Hals, if a burger costs one Hal at my favorite restaurant, I can pay for it both with a good Hal (first gen) or a bad Hal (second gen). So, the smart thing to do is the pay with a bad Hal, since that way I keep more gold in my pocket. Hence, the bad money drives out the good money.
How does this translate to Fiat and Bitcoin? It doesn't. It's a completely different paradigm, since neither dollars nor Bitcoin have a face value and a commodity value.
I hope this helps understand Gresham's Law a bit better. It's quite amazing how the confusion has spread across the Bitcoin circles.
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I buy and sell with Bitcoin since discovered it! I even sold houses with Bitcoin. Why not?!
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I'm wondering why not a single big newspaper allows paying for articles "pay as you go" behind a paywall with sats using lightning. I will not register and provide my payment details and pay for a monthly subscription with fiat. They can stick their fiat-paywalls up to the place where the sun doesn't shine.
Laszlo basically got free pizzas, and multiple times, not just that one time.
He also bought some more pizzas with lightning when that was new.
He also published the first GPU miner, so it's not like he only had 10k BTC and spent it all on pizzas and didn't have any BTC left.
Also, if he wouldn't have made that purchase, maybe BTC would still be worthless.
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I tip severs and bartenders all the time. I also offer to pay in Bitcoin to anyone running a small vending business.
So far I've had success getting people to download Phoenix or Muun wallets and tip or pay that way.
I offer discounts to people paying for personal training packages in Bitcoin.
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Tried to tip extra to an Uber driver (in addition to what I did in the app) and he told me that he wanted to get more understanding of it first before getting any. I literally was just going to have install Phoenix or even WoS and get some, but he declined.
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It can be tough because what do you say when someone says no to free money lol.
And it's hard to recommend a YouTube channel because a lot of people in the Bitcoin space are pretty deep into it.
So to a normie they may sound a little weird.
And many Bitcoiners are either anti-vax or say things like c**kbucks and that's not who I would want to show just anybody to follow even though most of their info is good otherwise.
Andreas is good but he goes into alt coins.
Any recommendations for Bitcoin only resources to send normies to?
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I couldn't agree more. Slowly but surely we will get there.
Just a bit tough to earn in bitcoin if your products do not specifically target the bitcoin community or aren't products which you need for a daily life. But I guess, we have to start somewhere :).
What was the latest thing you bought with bitcoin?
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great post. For many people it will be crucial to switch from fiat mentality. Less fiat you have and more bitcoin which naturally force you to use bitcoin for payments as you have an absolute minimum in fiat. If you are afraid of not having enough bitcoin because you use it for daily payments, then it is good to find a way to earn bitcoin or if that is not possible make regular purchases to accumulate what you have spent. Let's say you spend 0.1btc a month so every month you buy back 0.1btc to keep your stack intact. The best way is to find/create your local community and do p2p exchanges - cash, create circular economy, no kyc, etc....
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Excellent points here and I agree with the ‘use it’ argument… for most people I suspect it’s just a case of when…
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Great post!
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This article is reaction to previous discussion and poll
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Valued things increased their value when transitioning, thus the more we use Bitcoin the higher the value.
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Something was published already about Gresham's law and it was quite comprehensive, better refer to that post regarding the subject. The "law" looks valid in the local context, but it didn't hold valid in the larger context of world wide commerce.
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Instead pay with realy #bitcoin better yo use #LN layer 2. Pat with sats is more easy to understand. Instead paying 0.0001 BTC its better call 10k sats ⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡
🙏 “Cancel our debts, as we cancel the debts of others.”
Great thoughts! Thanks for sharing.
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.