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The #1 impediment to Bitcoin payments adoption is tax policy, not scaling technology.
I don't believe it's either one of those.
I suspect, on average, people trust the fiat system more than their own ability to keep their bitcoin safe.
Of course there's a lot of NGU, too, but I think almost every person entered this space through that lens and had to grow out of it.
Last week, I was away from home for a lightning dev bootcamp.
Sats spent on:
- Every day, lunch/groceries at supermarket (PicknPay)
- Breakfast at a cafe with my wife (Newport Deli, Mouille Points)
- Parking garage ticket (Cape Town Waterfront)
All of them via MoneyBadger + Phoenix.
Maybe you want to contact Btrust to ask them how they operate.
While they're a trust as opposed to a charity, I would expect many operational pieces to be very, very similar.
Won't somebody please think of the swimming pools?
No, because it's clearly Trump's|Putin's|global warming's|transphobia's|the other party's|Canada's fault.
I'd lobby for adding Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson to your fiction stack.
Yes, yes. It doesn't use the word Bitcoin once. But then again, it was released 1999, so there's that.
The currency in the book doesn't map the properties of Bitcoin exactly, but it gets fairly close. And it does carry the same cypherpunk spirit. I strongly suspect the author was familiar with The Sovereign Individual.
Long story short: I think it's a bloody fun read.
South Africa would be dope.
People here are actually spending sats. And I, for one, would love to see more tech talent become empowered to address the needs of the large pop of unbanked here.
Right now, I'm taking part in a lightning dev bootcamp aimed at beginners. Talking to the other participants, I noticed I'm surrounded by a metric ton of ambition.
Would be great to get local events hosted to help take the next step up.
Where or how did you find the hotel accepting sats? Or was it done thorough the third party app you use with picknpay?
They offered payment by Zapper, which works with the third party app, MoneyBadger.
btw, how is your price index going?
Still going...
Will keep posting updates once a month over at ~bitcoin_beginners
This past week, we bought quite a few things with sats:
- Breakfast at a cafe (Mugg and Bean)
- Stocked up on groceries at a supermarket (PicknPay)
- Meds and supplements at a drug store (DisChem)
- Dinner at a steakhouse (Turn n Tender)
- Got adjusted at a chiropractor who accepts payment in sats, and
- Paid for a hotel room to stay at during a conference, Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town. (Of course the ticket was bought with btc previously.)
The hotel and chiro were a first for us.
And I found it fitting to pay with sats for a hotel during a Bitcoin conference. :)
Works for me when I add the amount to withdraw to the invoice in Phoenix. Click the edit button on the receive screen to add an amount to the invoice if you haven't tried that yet.
I like using Jeff Booth's starting point as my own: "The natural state of the free market is deflationary."
A short explainer why, ie. increases in productivity & availability drive costs of production down. And if you can get agreement on that, the rest follows smoothly.
The next question then is why, despite the deflationary tendency, do prices continue to rise for everyone.
If all I'm doing is sending sats... which are immediately converted to Dollars for the merchant what's the point? I might as well be spending the "gold ETF" in my brokerage because that way it's being 'sold to someone else' (ie square) and the 'merchant' could just get Dollars in its place.
As I said before: It answers the valid question from newbies of what they can buy with bitcoin other than yet more bitcoin paraphernalia. "You can pay for a haircut" is likely worth a lot more to most than the usual "you can zap someone on some social media."
A step in the right direction isn't wasted simply because they didn't arrive at (what you think should be) their destination yet.
I worked there (in Australia) for a few years.
Some data seems outdated. Former co-CEO Scott Farquhar left in April 2024. Not quite an amicable split even though they tried hard to paper over the cracks.
Cannon-Brookes, as the other co-CEO, was more of the face, ie. PR and public image part while Scott focused on tech and not so much in the lime light.
The working culture there pre and during covid changed a lot. Many people showed heavy woke adoption and were very pushy towards others who did not fully, unquestionably embrace it.
The company took good care of their people. It felt that many were exploiting that to a degree.
I never kept the stock I got from options. Main reason being that my income was tied to them doing well, so no point in getting more risk exposure tied to the company.
Even so, I don't think I would have wanted exposure. They were starting to feel the squeeze by several competitors. Microsoft's acquisition of Github around the time put them square across the board as direct competitor for their, at the time, most profitable product: Jira.
Notion was starting to eat their Confluence lunch. Not that it was terribly much loved before that anyway.
And a final, finer point as to why that mattered:
They used to approach marketing as bottom-up matter. They had no marketing budget (let alone department) to impress the bigwigs to buy their "suite" and tell their people to use it.
Instead they tried to build a product so good that devs would start deploying it for their own team, then letting it spread organically through other teams, and finally up the (middle) management layers.
As Microsoft with big bucks and huge established influence over corporations came in as competitor, Atlassian were starting to pivot. Not sure where that ended, as I left around that time.