Intransigent Tipping

Last year, I went to my local farmers market in an attempt to orange pill farmers. The idea was to shake a farmer's hand like Texas Slim shakes the hand of a rancher. Of course, I'm not as skilled with the gift of gab as Mr. Slim is, and I talk to computers better than I talk to people. Invariably, my attempts at cramming orange pills deep down the throats of beekeepers and bakers were met with more rejection than my attempts at asking girls out in high school. I didn't take detailed stats, but I would estimate that only 1% of all the people I asked said yes--To accepting bitcoin, my high school date asking stats were 0% successful. The baker was into Ethereum, and some kid told his mom she should accept bitcoin, but only one dude actually accepted it. He gave me an address generated from his Trust wallet. To be clear, if a wallet has the name trust in it, here is now to improve your bitcoin security:

Step 1: Sweep all the bitcoin from this wallet.
Step 2: Tape your phone to a red brick.
Step 3: Throw the brick into the nearest ocean.

We are definitely so early, so I gave up out of frustration. The biggest obstacle to getting people to accept bitcoin as payment is understanding that it works as a payment. It's not feasible to explain everything I have learned about bitcoin over the last nine years to some people who still trust the banks. Have fun staying in a collapsing bank buddy.

I've since moved and there's no farmers market within a 20-mile radius. I do most of my grocery shopping on apps like Walmart.com. I buy gift cards with bitcoin, but this is not really the same as spending bitcoin peer to peer. I spend it to bitrefill and presume bitrefill converts it to fiat to pay for the gift cards. That's cool, but it's not the same as buying a cheeseburger from Wendy's with your Phoenix wallet. One time, I bought some rats for my son's ball python by scanning a QR code from the Cash App. I tried paying with bitcoin, but to my dismay, it worked the two weeks to flatten the curve strategy. What to do?

Cash App Is Ubiquitous

Things have improved a a little. I can buy a haircut with bitcoin in about twenty minutes, but I cut my own hair because I can stack more sats and save more time. I don't orange pill bartenders because I don't drink anymore, but I recently went to an art walk hosted in the downtown market district. It's like a farmers market, except the vendors sell art instead of purple carrots and overpriced honey. Many of the Vendors use the Cash App. This one ice cream truck had a tip jar next to a sign that shows her cash tag.

That gave me the idea to tip her bitcoin using the cashtag. I tipped the ice cream truck 10 dollars worth of bitcoin. Never mind seed oils and fiat food tomfoolery. I eat ice cream some times and hate lflamming hot cheetos as much as the next bitcoiner. Is it KYC-free? No, but she already accepts bitcoin, and I use the Cash app for all the fiat purchases I make anyway. I don't want to be too KY-sanctimonious when all these vendors use the cash app. First you fix the money. Then you fix the world.

I want entrepreneur to get used to the idea of accepting bitcoin. I want to show them that they can accept bitcoin before I ask next time. Otherwise it seems like some complicated thing. Hot Cheeto fusion Ice cream makers will never run a node. That's fine. They don't need to.

The next day, Guy Swann posted a short story on Nostr about how he refused to sell his bitcoin for a down payment on contract work and said he would look for someone who accepted bitcoin directly. He told this story on his podcast, too. He said he was part of the intransigent minority. I've written about this before, but I will expand upon it here. The idea omes from Cory Klipenstien's essay. The man who wrote the original forward to the Bitcoin Standard He is now a no-coiner, and to quote BTCMinstrel, "He ain't going to stack no more."

Nevertheless, observed something he calls the minority rule. The idea is that minorities can have more power than the majority. He uses kosher beverages to illustrate this point. Every carbonated beverage in the United States is kosher. Why? No, it's not that the Jews run the world. This is not an anti-Semitic argument. I'm not an anti-Semite. If you're too stupid to realize this, go back to Facebook.

Three percent of the population in the United States is Jewish. It is a tiny minority of the US population. Three percent of 330,000,000 is 9,900,00 people. (Don't trust; verify.) Let's just round up to ten million to keep things simple. Imagine if Coca-Cola added non-kosher ingredients to their secret sugar water formula, but Pepsi's brown, bubbly sugar water was kosher. Coca-Cola would lose 10 million US customers to Pepsi. The other 320,000,000 don't give a shit if their soda is Kosher or not. Yet no soda made in America is non-kosher because of this small Jewish minority. That is minority rule.

Cory included this math in a blog post he wrote entitled "The Intransigent Minority. He thinks we need 10 million bitcoiners to make hyper-bitcoinization a reality. He estimates that 100,000 people already understand it—maybe 20% of those understand it enough to "fight for it." As I re-read it, I noticed Kory never explicitly says we need 10,000,000 people who refuse to pay with anything but bitcoin, but it's implied.

He also implies that we need to fight for it. Well, what does that mean? We don't need to put up our dukes and kick the Federal Reserve in the nads. We need to refuse to pay anyone in anything but bitcoin.

That's how we achieve more Bitcoin adoption, but I can't demand my credit union allow me to pay my mortgage in bitcoin. It starts with tipping an ice cream lady with bitcoin using the Cash app a few times. Next time, leave a card from tipcards.io

Fix The Money Tip The World

I also tip wait staff, bus boys, and baristas and budtenders in bitcoin. I don't get too pushy. The first time I tried this, I wrote a letter asking the waiter to send a lightning address to some burner email, and I would send him some sats. He laughed like a little girl who just heard a big fart. Tip cards are much easier. Now I put a 4,000-sat tip card into the tip jar every time I order coffee or taco. I give 40,000 Sat tipcard.io cards to waiters. I keep a stack of these cards in my wallet. I find it best to load them at the time of ordering. To do this, I do a little quick math. Instead of looking up the price of bitcoin, I use a little trick I learned from the Audacity to Podcast. I look at the price of 1,000 sats. At the time of this writing, 1,000 sats is about 28 cents. If I want to tip about a dollar, I know that it will be a little over 3000 sats so I round up to 4,000. That's actually $1.12, but the math is easier.

Show Them The Money

Try tipping with bitcoin yourself. I was surprised to see how many people are using the cash app now. It makes sense given they have sold over two billion worth of bitcoin. I bet many of the people using it already have bought some bitcoin with it. If not, maybe this will be the catalyst for them to finally take the orange pill and learn what it's all about. Too many people think this is just a speculative asset because they have never seen it in action.

Make the path to hyperbitcoinization a little faster. Keep tipcards in your own meatspace wallet. To get out if gradually and finally reach suddenly, we can't go on telling them bitcoin is money. We must show them.

blogging bitcoin
block height: 789,094