Orange Pilling Merchants
On the Freedom Foot Print show, Brian DeMint said he’s friend’s with a coffee shop owner in Riverside, California--The place where I host my bi-monthly bitcoin meetup. For the last 12,960 blocks or so, I've held a plebwalk on the first Saturday of each month. This plebwalk has been a solo-trek each time. More people are interested in going to meetups where we sit down and drink drugs like beer, soda, or coffee. Therefore, I have decided to cancel my Pleb Walk and move the meetup to Arcade Coffee Bakehouse the coffee shop mentioned on my favorite bitcoin author's podcast. Not to brag, but I bought an autographed copy of Sovereignty Through Mathematics with bitcoin from Knut Svanholm about 8,000 blocks ago. Just kidding, I am trying to brag.
Plebwalks did not attract as many plebs as I had hoped. I suspect I might spark more interest if we went to a coffee house that accepted bitcoin. Arcade Coffee-The Bakehouse in Riverside California does not accept bitcoin yet but I hope to change that. Some of my first blogs were about me going to the Riverside Farmer's Market to ask people if they accept bitcoin. About one-in-a-hundred said yes. This taught me an important lesson. That shit doesn't work. Rather than go home and cry in my coffee, what if I try a different approach?
The main problem is social proof. People are social animals. They look to others to see what they should or should not do. My dad handed me green paper to buy ice-cream from a dude with a mustache selling sugar to kids out of a van. That's the paradigm of money for most people. That's what everyone used for money before we became a nation of credit card debtors. We don't pay people anymore. We pay debt off to banks. Should I buy a Mercedes, or a whole Bitcoin? If you're reading this, you are more likely to drive an old Toyota, but most people will buy a Mercedes because suits like to pick their nose in cars made by Mercedes-Benz, or the richest man in the world. They think, I should buy a Mercedes-Benz so I can pick my nose like the rest of the successful people. Picking my nose in a Tesla is the ultimate status symbol. You need to have a great job and a great debt score to pick your nose in a Tesla.
Bitcoin was declared dead more times than I could give a fuck to count, but you know what really died? Cash. According to Dave Ramsey, "Cash is King." I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news Mr. Ramsey, but your king is dead. Almost nobody uses paper cash, let alone p2p cash. "This bill is legal tender and must be accepted for all debts both public and private." . Well...that's just about all you pay with it, debt. Cash not accepted at many places these days. I guess the legal tender mumbo-jumbo means your credit card must accept cash to pay off your debt. Besides you'll get "cash back" if you use your credit card. That's not cash. It's more like Weekend At Bernie's Cash. It's social engineering which created social proof that teaches everyone should pay with a credit card, not cash. Guess what fixes this. That's only used by drug dealers, and people who dry-clean money or whatever laundering it means.
It would be nice to pay for my coffee with bitcoin rather than pay credit card with bitcoin. To do this, I can't just be the one caffeine-crazed junkie, hopped up on orange pills, asking the poor barista, "Do you accept our lord and savior, bitcoin?" But what if ten people asked to pay for coffee with bitcoin? What if 21 people asked to pay for their coffee in bitcoin? 50? By the way, tell the credit card companies to go fuck themselves by shoving their fees up their ass. "Gradually...then suddenly," is a better catch phrase, but Parker Lewis already coined it and I digress. If I can bring enough customers, we will have social proof for p2p e-cash. That's the hard part, but we have to start somewhere.
How Businesses Can Accept Bitcoin.
People have been thinking about on-boarding businesses to accept payments for over a decade. NVK says that’s how Coinkite started, but the demand wasn’t there. It’s still not there. We need to create it. Strike has a Clover integration that works like this.
Maybe you don’t want to spend your bitcoin because of the taxes or maybe the coffee house owner is a no-coiner. So what? Resist the urge to say “have fun staying poor.” Tell them the bitcoin can auto-magically convert to Trump’s favorite fiat currency. Then again, it's probably not a good idea to say that. Strike gives anyone the ability to accept just about any currency they want though. Jack Mallers once compared bitcoin to peanuts and fiat to tortilla chips. People alergic to the peanuts can get the tortilla chips man. I love Jack Mallers, but it was a bad analogy. The important thing is that blue check Twitter BTC Maxis don’t need to spend their own “muh taxes” BTC and no-coiner business owners allergic to orange peanuts can get the green tortilla chips they really want: Win-Win.
strike
Strike can’t pour a lot of resources into getting businesses to accept bitcoin as a payment when there’s no demand, but they have given us the tools to do it. Brian Tracy said, "if it’s to be, it’s up to me." He's right. Making bitcoin peer-to-peer cash is up to me and up to you. Some meetups have already integrated payments at their meetups. It's one of the best ways to grow bitcoin as peer 2 peer electronic cash. Many of the people who have signed up for my meetup are not aware of the lightning network. Some of them think video on a blockchain is the next way to pick their nose in a Lambo on the moon. They like “BTC” too. I say why video game on a blockchain NGMI and show them the lightning network.
After I give my spiel, I say, "so show me how this video game on a blockchain works." I might as well ask them to unify the theory of gravity. They don't know what a blockchain is.
"Wallet, you mean like my Coinbase wallet?"
Coinbase is good at marketing. They convinced the ETF's to let Coinbase HODL their bitcoin. They don't know how to accept payments. They think lightning addresses are for email. They sell SHIBullshit and send nasty letters to people playing online poker. Bitcoin doesn't fix this. We fix this, but I need some help. Like I said, it won't work if it's just me.
Note:
I called the coffee house mentioned on the podcast. They have another location that does use clover down the road, but they use Square at the location the author from the Freedom Footprint show likes to frequent. Thank Zeus we can use Square anyway.
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Note: Pablo asked me to set up tiers on highlighter.com, so I did. I am also interested in FOSS AI and decided to use elevenlabs to create audio-versions of my blog after listening to this episode of AI U unchained I highly encourage you to listen to this episode even though it's not technically a bitcoin podcast--I think it is. The idea is to create a podcast feed for subscribers, but I don't have all the details worked out yet so I put this first audio recording on Spotify.
