Bitcoin adoption doesn’t happen because another person buys Bitcoin and waits for the price to go up.
It happens when Bitcoin becomes useful money.
While I was in Hong Kong, I sat down with Zach Wizenberg, a young builder who is working on exactly that problem.
Zach’s BASIC desktop bitcoin miner on Amazon.
At the time we recorded, Zach and his team had helped bring 28 Hong Kong merchants live with Bitcoin payments in less than two months.
But one point from our conversation stuck with me:
Merchant adoption means very little if Bitcoiners never actually spend Bitcoin.
You can onboard 1,000 businesses, but if nobody walks through the door and pays them in sats, eventually those businesses have little reason to keep accepting it.
Zach described it as a simple supply-and-demand problem. Merchants are the supply side, and customers are the demand side.
A few things I took away from the conversation:
Stop selling merchants on ideology.
Talk to them about their business. Lower processing costs. No chargebacks. Less fraud. New customers. Easier payments.
Bitcoin UX has to compete with existing payment systems.
The Basic POS is designed so an employee doesn’t need to understand Bitcoin. Enter the HKD amount, generate the invoice, scan, confirm payment, print a receipt. It just has to work, and there is massive opportunity to create solutions for point of sale and online payments.
Zach had another line I liked:
“Bitcoin is at the end of the beginning.”
I agree. Bitcoin has proven it can be a savings technology. Now comes the harder, and arguably more important part:
Can it become money?
New episode of We Are Satoshi with Zach Wizenberg.
