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274 sats \ 13 replies \ @k00b 13 Oct \ on: We don’t need more bitcoin merchants bitcoin
The incentive to hoard good money and spend bad money is too high. You have to get rid of that incentive by:
- getting consumers on a 100% bitcoin standard
- or getting merchants on a 100% bitcoin standard
If people have bad money and merchants accept bad money, only the good natured mission driven types will spend good money.
I think it's important to realize that if you want bitcoin to become the global currency, you will have to start spending it at some point, so why not start today.
Spending bitcoin is actually how you can directly support bitcoin.
There are couple approaches and tricks that can be useful to mitigate some of the worries that newbies may have:
- spend-and-replace: Buy stuff with bitcoin, but then immediately buy the same amount of bitcoin with fiat. This has nice side-effects: you are adding more value to bitcoin economy (hopefully the merchant keeps it) - NgU - and you are incentivizing the merchant to continue supporting bitcoin.
- use app like Strike that has "use fiat to pay any lightning invoice", which then means that you are not responsible for any taxable events, completely avoiding any headache around that. The benefits are the same as with spend-and-replace.
- join a community of bitcoin spenders. Every country now has a community of folks trying to add more merchants and spend everywhere. They organize in chat groups and fill things into https://btcmap.org/ (example is https://einundzwanzig.space/ )
I have been spending bitcoin literally every day recently for electronics, home supplies, etc. and it's starting to feel normal.
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This is has been the main cognitive dissonance in bitcoin for several years now: stacking vs spending. There really is no practical incentive to spend.
There is also a network effect that bitcoin just doesn't have yet. It's easy to critique tradfi platforms like Venmo or Paypal for being closed systems... but bitcoin is not all that different right now. If you don't have any bitcoin it is just another payment platform you don't have access to and doesn't work with anything you have. Someone may as well be asking you to Venmo them and sadly, you don't have Venmo.
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Spend and replace, it's not hard
If noones spending, what's the incentive for merchants to accept this if one person per year comes and pays
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EARN in sats.
That is the first important step.
After that, spending is coming naturally.
I live using bitcoin only from 2018: earn in sats, spend (wisely) in sats, hold in sats. No more fiat here.
But people should understand one important thing: once you start living in a Bitcoin Standard, you will NOT spending so much as in a fiat standard. You are spending only on things you really need. Forget about your lazy fiat life spending all around your money.
That's why you will not see so many bitcoiners spending:
- because not all are still EARNING directly in sats, they still DCA
- because those that earn in sats appreciate more each sat and they will spend it only when is really need it.
What really need those merchants is to start PAYING their employees and suppliers in BTC. Then you will see the magic... of bitcoin circular economy.
So saying that we don't need more bitcoin merchants is stupid. Bitcoin circular economies start by circulating the money (sats), not by stagnating them.
As I explained here: #576140
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In my opinion...
Bitcoiners should think of it this way, 2% of what we save we should try to spend to help merchant adoption. Ie if saving 100$ then maybe find a productive way to spend 2$. 2 dollars/euros will buy a lot of sats on lightning.
Nostr, Stacker news, a cup of coffee every once in a while... a few sats goes a long way when it's spent on others and they appreciate it. If nothing else it's proof that the tech still works, it's a great demo and it shows to people that Bitcoiners are serious.
Just my opinion.
Edit: I don't know why text appeared italicized not intentional lol
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It is not like that.
All these merchants may be instead of using CEXes just do something and sell something for Bitcoin.
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