Tag Archives: unfortunately

The post Merchants Don’t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements appeared com. This is a cross-post from Spiral’s blog, the original post can be found here. Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is everyday money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin’s existence, there just haven’t been many places to spend it. But then, something happened. Planets aligned, seas parted, nerds hooted and hollered from rooftops, and Block added support for bitcoin payments to millions of Square sellers, making bitcoin both ubiquitous and easy to activate. Suddenly, almost everyone is seconds away from accepting bitcoin payments. Pretty cool, right? Right? Yeah, except how merchants should accept bitcoin payments isn’t the only problem. Why merchants should accept bitcoin payments. That’s the boogeyman we need to vanquish. It always has been. How we do this is more apparent and pragmatic than bitcoin tropes about digital scarcity and immutability, neither of which will convert someone running an ice cream shop. What will motivate small business owners to accept bitcoin payments is their bottom line. They’re unlikely to be ideological; they’re far more likely to be practical. And what’s the most common problem in need of a practical solution faced by merchants that only bitcoin can solve in a digital-only world? Credit card fees and the death of cash. Back when cash ruled everything around everyone, 3% credit card fees on every purchase were just a distant but frightening hypothetical. It was a better time to run a small business, a time when everyone carried cash, businesses universally accepted it, and margins were chonk. This is, obviously, no longer the case. And yet, this is where it gets interesting: credit card companies have been so successful at ridding the world of physical cash that they’ve created the perfect stage for the bitcoin-minded to make the. Continue reading Merchants Don’t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements→