Crypto's Adoption Failure

The restaurant was on the waterfront. Millionaires parked their super yachts literally a hop, skip, and a jump away. I stood waiting to be seated. I was nervous. When I get nervous, I get chatty. To the waitress, I blurted out: “I’m going to treat myself to a cocktail, because bitcoin just got to $100,000.”

With a smile, she said in a thick Spanish accent: “There’s an $80 minimum for bitcoin.”¹

Plans ruined.

It was a gorgeously sunny afternoon. There was another restaurant twenty minutes away, but this experience had taken the wind out of my sails, so I went home. There’s a reason I was nervous. It was to be the first time I bought anything with cryptocurrency in offline life.

I still haven’t. It has been a couple of years now.

Medium of Exchange?

Bitcoin Maxis— don’t get your hackles up. I’m not taking a potshot at bitcoin. Please read to the end; you might be surprised at my conclusion.

I’m saying that folk need to look at adoption in the wider community. We need to look hard at bitcoin and other cryptos being used to buy daily wares. Why not admit that the take-up has been a bit of a disaster? Some blame the Blocksize War of 2017; some blame high fees; some blame compromized leaders. This post will not chase down the why. It will make some findings and then point a way forward.

The Bitcoin-Usage-in-Africa experiment

Gabriel Custodiet did an interesting experiment. In a city in Kenya, he drew a 10km radius on a map, and called upon all the businesses which claimed to accept bitcoin. He’s one of the finest writers in the anti-technocracy space and well worth reading for yourself.² Plot spoiler: Not a single experience was fruitful. At best, ‘accepting bitcoin’ meant using pseudo-banking in the form of Coinbase or similar. At worst...

...I had a local guide who acted as a buffer and kept me safe, but the prospect of being the foreigner in shady spots, trying to exchange Bitcoin, was a gamble that could have gone terribly wrong.

Mostly, he got shrugs.

Back to the waterfront restaurant

I have ground to believe that the owner of that restaurant with the $80 threshold only offered bitcoin because seafaring oligarchs asked enough times for it. The restaurant’s owner cared not for bitcoin’s adoption.³ I doubt he cared for slogans from Austrian Economics. I hold that cryptopians have pushed a crude and ultimately useless campaign on merchants— insofar as they have pushed one at all. The campaign crudely targets merchants as investors.

Merchants need to be treated as merchants. To get them to bite, the bait needs to be right. Crypto should be compared to fiat, and, broadly, the comparison must show that crypto is...

• ... as easy to use; and/or...
• ... more profitable; and/or...
• ... in great demand.

Now, here’s the rub. The answer to the first two criteria is arguable and hangs on other factors. For example, if you’re in Illinois, U.S.A., it is not more profitable. The answer to the final criterion is a simple “no.”

A week when the basics were too much to ask for

I say that the ease-of-use criterion is arguable. That’s being kind to my side. It’s a frail argument when one merely glances at the number of folk waving their smartphones at P.o.S. terminals in supermarkets. Those folk will find using an off-the-shelf crypto app to be a big step backwards.

This week hammered the point home for me. I had gyp⁴ with almost every simple crypto transaction I tried. Four different apps did me pain. The most vexing was probably Blixt, because I wasn’t sure whether it was a ‘spinning wheel of death’ or just slowness.⁵

It was just slowness. Does it matter? Imagine standing at the bar, looking like a numptie, while your Apple-Pay(ing) mates have started sipping their Mojitos back at the table.

Crypto-numpties waiting at the bar did happen recently, and you won’t believe where.

If it doesn’t work in Brisbane...

Brisbane, Australia, is one of the most crypto-friendly places of the world. Top 10 for sure. What does it say that a punter at a Brisbaneian bar commented recently “bitcoin payments at the bar failed during the evening”? What does it say that this was at a Bitcoin meetup?

That’s like a battery blowing up at a Tesla convention.

It says “bitcoin is not ready for primetime.”

The Good News

Thank God!

We’ve got a Billy Joel here.

Did you know that Piano Man wasn’t his first album? Lucky that his first, Cold Spring Harbor, flopped, because it was mediocre. First impressions count.

Likewise, a primetime slot for bitcoin would have been a disaster. Bitcoin, and any other crypto, is just not ready.

We need to look at this as a blessing. It’s like we’ve been blessed with a second chance. We get to iron out the kinks in a more realistic time frame. We’ve got 5-10 years, I reckon, to get things right.

This means that the people doing the work to make crypto better must focus on things to make basic daily usage better.

Here are some tick-boxes.

Organized software support

Do not use Telegram or Discord as your main means of support! It’s haphazard at best. Use e-mail, A.I., and a well-designed website.

Sales Reps

Anyone with over ten years experience as a sales rep should put his or her hand up to train eager, unemployed Zoomers in the art. Customer-facing sales-repping should not be left up to corporations with vested interests.

Node simplicity

Current software options are still too thorny. We need more normies running nodes. The more nodes, the more ‘zero-conf’ reliability.⁶ Start9 is a good start here, pardon the pun.

No maximalism

Put the merchant first. He or she shouldn’t be part of your ‘Sir Galahad’ quest. There is zero-chance a merchant offering only BTC won’t have a punter walk in with USDT. Something like Trocador is a great thing for merchants.

Takeaways

• Don’t treat a merchant just like any crypto investor.
• Failure of widespread adoption is a blessing in disguise.
• Better software support, trained sales reps, and simpler nodes are needed.
• Maximalism hurts the merchants.