TaraEverettSVD

charts

Boycott Bitcoin Magazine & Their Shitcoin Conference

YeseniaMontoyaD0Y

True. You could announce when people are totally eliminated, not just when their date passes but it will take some management on your part to keep track of. For instance if I have day 450 and we reach that day and the next closest entry is day 480, once we reach day 466 I am eliminated. 

tech

I meet quite a lot of people who understand the meaning of bitcoin but don't want to pay with it. They are fans of bitcoin, they try to have as much of it as possible, but they don't want to use it to pay for various reasons. This may sound logical to you, but I believe that there is often a flawed reasoning behind it.

## There are many reasons not to pay with bitcoin

1. **Don't know how to account for the transactions or don't want to pay additional taxes?**  
Changing terms and unfair rules are annoying. I understand if such complications deter you from paying. However, bitcoin was created so that you no longer have to ask anyone for permission.
2. **No place to pay?**  
The number of places where one can pay is slowly increasing. But nowadays, I would say it's more of a lack of demand from customers. If this is still the reason, let your merchants know. Look at [map](https://btcmap.org/map) and use bitcoin where you can.
3. **Is it inconvenient?**  
Using bitcoin is getting easier every day. New tools are being created all the time. However, if you don't feel like exploring different apps or it's too much work for you for some other reason, you may not be ready to pay with bitcoin yet.
4. **Are you concerned about volatility?**  
It is not desirable for prices to be fixed, but it is true that too much volatility can be uncomfortable. Sometimes you pay a little more, sometimes a little less. Mentally it can be unpleasant at first, but over time you speculate less and less. Short-term fluctuations are irrelevant in the long run.
5. **Are you low on bitcoin?**  
This common problem can be solved, for example, by simply buying more bitcoin.
6. **Does it cost too much to get bitcoin?**  
If you save something in bitcoin once in a while, that cost still exists. The only question left is how much bitcoin to acquire.

### How to acquire bitcoin for a fixed or even no fee

We often also pay a fee expressed as a percentage from the exchange of fiat for bitcoin. So if you buy more bitcoin, you also pay a larger fee. Figuratively, this fee makes it more expensive to potentially pay with bitcoin. However, you still have several options to avoid such a fee.

1. **Be paid with bitcoin**  
Try asking your employer, or find a new job at [stacker.news](https://stacker.news/~jobs/r/hynek)
2. **Offer goods and services for bitcoin**  
Whenever you sell something, you can demand bitcoin again. Whether you're settling bills with friends for payment at lunch or offering goods at a marketplace. You can always use bitcoin.
3. **Try bitcoin mining**  
If you have spare capital, you can invest in mining machines to earn a regular bitcoin income.
4. **Find a bitcoiner**  
Join a community [in your area](https://twentyone.world/) and meet other bitcoiners. You might find a person who already has bitcoin income and will be happy to exchange some of it for you - at least until they can pay everywhere with bitcoin.
5. **Export for a fixed fee**  
Similarly, you can vexl with the [Vexl](https://vexl.it/) app. You can try to demand a fixed-fee exchange so that a larger purchase doesn't represent an additional cost to you. 

There are a lot of reasons not to pay with bitcoin, and few people can overcome them painlessly. So in these cases, I can understand why you don't pay with bitcoin. 

## Gresham's Law is not a good reason to use fiat

But you may have also heard that bitcoin is better than fiat, so you'll save it and get rid of the worse money → i.e. fiat. This phenomenon is known as Gresham's Law, although it was probably first enunciated by [Nicolas Copernicus](https://stacker.news/items/219030/r/hynek). 

I have the impression that this principle has made at least one halving generation a little crazy with the notion of [HODL](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1325563-hodl). The idea of HODL is that you don't speculate, play slots and buy shitcoins. It could also be loosely interpreted as `be thrifty`. But sometimes you still need to buy something - like food, for example. Under the Gresham's Law interpretation, you should pay with the worst money you have. Such grain could be used to pay, and in many countries it still has a worse ability to hold value than fiat. Still, you'd rather pay with fiat.

### Why don't you pay with grain?

Again, you probably have several reasons.

1. **You don't carry grain with you**  
Not only do you not carry it with you. First of all, you don't want to store it. You don't even want to speculate on the price of grain. Grain is simply worse money, so you don't want to have it in the first place. Nor do you want to hold fiat if you come to the conclusion that it's worse money than bitcoin. 
That view doesn't have to be all or nothing. Feel free to have some grain, but don't tell me you want to use it for payment. That only applies in the very short term when you need to get rid of it.
2. **Traders accepting grain are weird**  
Even the method of payment can reveal something about the merchant. What would you think of a person today who gets paid in grain? If someone demands an outdated form of payment, you can easily be put off. Conversely, a business with new options can become a [love brand](https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2022/11/04/become-a-bitcoin-%e2%9d%a4%ef%b8%8f-brand-why-accept-bitcoin/) for people.
3. **Paying with grain is insulting**  
You are showing that you don't respect the merchant by offering an inferior form of payment.  
4. **No one accepts grain anymore**  
Today, virtually no merchant will accept grain as payment. In fact, the so-called Thiers Law works in exactly the opposite direction against Gresham's Law. This basically says that even a merchant has his limits and if the money offered is too bad, he will simply refuse it. Whoever has grain ready for payment at that time will not pay with it anywhere. Fortunately, he could at least use it for consumption. But what do you do with a worthless fiat?

## Don't regret spending bitcoins

Imagine buying two pizzas many years ago and paying with bitcoin. If you had done it like Laszlo Hanyecz did on May 22, 2010, it would have cost you a total of 10,000 bitcoins. As of August 14, 2023, you could have 2,940,000,000 USD instead. (Almost three billion 😱)

Would you be sorry you used bitcoin to do it back then? In his own words, Laszlo Hanyecz never regretted it because the pizza was really good. I used to think he was just bragging, but it must bother him now. Nowadays, I practically don't see why paying with bitcoin should bother him directly.

If we regret spending bitcoin, it's usually because we expect its value to increase. However, the payment itself is just a transfer of value, and from that perspective it doesn't matter what form we use. Laszlo simply spent the value of two pizzas. In the same way, he might regret every crown he did not exchange for bitcoin that day. Since it's abstract, it makes us feel less angry, but in the same way that Laszlo lost money years ago, so did all the people in the world who didn't buy bitcoin that day. The only difference is that we don't know their names.

## Why pay with bitcoin instead

1. **Better privacy than credit cards**  
Your bank account information is not private. You never know who is watching all your transactions. Bitcoin payments via Ligthning Network are not perfect in this respect either, but the level of privacy is very high.
2. **Building an efficient and moral ecosystem**  
For example, during the covid, a lot of businesses were banned from doing business. You may find this justifiable, but you may not agree in all cases. Bitcoin allows you to cooperate even when someone doesn't like it. The more people know how to use bitcoin, the more options you will have. Every payment you make supports this free network.
3. **Meeting interesting people**  
Bitcoiners are often very intelligent and inspiring people. Since bitcoin payments are still very rare, virtually every time you make a payment there will be a new conversation, again cementing you in a growing community.
4. **Trying new technologies**  
Maybe you like to play around. Bitcoin payments are a very dynamic environment. New tools are constantly being created. You can participate directly or at least be among the first to try them out. With bitcoin, for example, you can pay with QR codes, NFC cards, rings and other chips, or send a payment to a phone number or email address.
5. **You can hold more bitcoin**  
If you pay with bitcoin, you won't need as much depreciating fiat. That way, it will also pay off in the long run.

## Conclusion

Don't get me wrong. Bitcoin is free money, so you can do whatever you want with it. Feel free not to use it. But I wanted to point out a pretty simple idea that if you want to have relatively more bitcoin in the long run compared to fiat, you have to use it for payments as well. Otherwise you are forced to have too much depreciating fiat all the time. There are lots of reasons not to pay with bitcoin, but it's not that bitcoin is too good for that. On the other hand, there are already plenty of good reasons to pay with bitcoin. If you're ready to try bitcoin, join the [Twenty-One world](https://twentyone.world/) community.

_Since it is not possible to edit posts here, you can find the latest version on my [GitHub](https://github.com/hynek-jina/Hynek/blob/main/blog/Is%20it%20time%20to%20pay%20with%20bitcoin.md)_

Is it time to pay with bitcoin?

conspiracy

SN and the Zen of 1sat=1sat

ClaytonHall3UW

What are some of the main challenges designing the onboarding user flows for new users, accounts timed to traditional banking/money, but unclear (or scared) about Bitcoin? Any interesting observations?

@realBitcoinDog Bitcoin Story - No, social media had nothing to do with it xD

MarisaGuerraFR0

I know Darth is calling me a shitcoiner from SN heaven or hell, wherever he went, but I initially thought NFTs were an interesting idea and had potential until the primary use case was jpegs. 


earth

Immortal Communities

EmmaLeonD0P

We (Clams) are making good progress on an MVP that we hope will help bitcoiners visualize their sats flow across all of their wallets. See a short demo here https://github.com/PlebLab/Top-Builder/issues/16#issuecomment-1932049134

Would be cool to know what types of information folks would like to see on a sats flow dashboard. For example, we could show charts to track income over time. What else comes to mind that would be useful? In particular, I'd like to hear from anyone that is trying to run a Bitcoin business. 

news

Interest in a Lightning Address Alias Service?

MakaylaJosephFL3

Why does Stratum V2 matter (outside of better communication between pool and miner) if the pools with the majority of the hashrate such as Antpool, Via BTC, Foundry, Luxor, SBI Crypto, F2Pool, etc will likely never allow their customers to construct their own blocks?

Also doesn't it put the pool in a weird situation to have to choose whether or not to approve the miner's proposed block?

There is definitely many problems in mining. Curious how Stratum actually solved it in practice. 

bitcoin

We tried to tell you motherfuckers

StephenMathewsECJ

It's been really obvious to me since 2007, that in order to scale, an onion routing network needs to pay its routers. This is why I'm building [Indra](https://github.com/Indra-Labs/indra/blob/main/doc/whitepaper.md). You can find me on old Tor mailing list talking about the crappiness of Tor for SSH and IRC as well, just search for "vennik". I have got some basic sponsorship to work on this full time and hopefully spiral.xyz will come through with some more.

Disclosure: Btcd consensus bugs due to usage of signed transaction version

CarolineCaseyBP3

i know how frustrating when work with apple store....

It will cost more time than writing code...

When submitting Bsats to apple store, I cannot dare to mention it has login feature.. otherwise it will force you to implement sign in with apple...

I own and manage apartment complexes - its what I have done for over 25 years at this point and I am pretty good at it... I am also a Bitcoiner and I am trying to build a better future on top of Bitcoin that provides value to as many people as possible (including myself).

I have posted on this previously here -> https://stacker.news/items/472995

This is an update on how its going and what my mind is cooking up....

So I have 1/6 resident(s) that paid with Bitcoin back in Nov. received a $326.86 rent credit this month - that means their rent paid in Bitcoin increased in FIAT value by $653.72 from when they paid it to me. Obviously I also benefited by that amount as well...this seems to be a win/win use case for Bitcoin. On top of that I am able to save 100% of that Bitcoin (in cold storage of course). 

As I am building this business model I have realized the following:

1.  I am in a unique position of not having a prohibitive amount of leverage on my properties which allows me to meet the FIAT needs while accepting about 60% of rent payments in Bitcoin if I ever get there.

2. This business model is so "extreme" that almost no one I talk to about it - gets it. (I am starting to think that I am just not doing an adequate job of explaining how it can work?)

3. My Bitcoin holdings value will likely exceed that of the FIAT debt on the property after less than 8 years (should Bitcoins value continue on its cycle of eating all the value of the current financial system).

4. I need to refine this down to a more concise Business Plan and really start pushing some investors down this rabbit hole :)

5. This is what I have so far... its going to be a non-profit - I am thinking of one of my buildings into it...

1.	Mission Statement: At FWBTCHI our mission is to provide high quality affordable housing to as many people as possible at as many different income levels as possible. We will do this through incorporating Bitcoin into our business model in order to decouple the properties from the current burdens imposed by the various FIAT systems under which they have been forced to operate. This decoupling allows us to maintain rents at 10% below FMR and ensures we always have the ability to maintain the properties in decent, safe, and sanitary conditions.
2.	Needs Assessment: The world has a shortage of high quality, well-maintained, affordable housing. This is clear by simply looking around your current neighborhood with very few exceptions. The FIAT systems we currently live in have proven to be beneficial to the few nearest the money printers and have led to a deepening divide between those who have affordable housing and those who don't. It truly is an ever-worsening problem though those at the top will attempt to tell you different. It doesn't matter where you live, what once was affordable for more is now affordable for fewer. We at FWBTCHI aim to truly change the past paradigms that we all have been stuck within and ensure the affordability crisis ends.
3.	Program Development: Our non-profit business model is really quite simple. We encourage our residents to learn about the current financial system and the system being built upon the Bitcoin (or sound money) Standard. We then allow them to make the decision as to whether they want to participate in our program simply by their decision to pay us their rent in Bitcoin or not. Of course, we provide educational support and examples to our residents to base their decisions upon but in the end, it is 100% up to them. Just living at our property ensures that their rent is 10% below the Fair Market Rent for the area in which they live. We ensure this is the case through an annual Rent Comparison Study (RCS) that we perform ourselves and through a RCS that we pay a 3rd party to perform every 5 years (this ensures we are staying in line). If we are out of compliance with this 10% lower rate there will be penalties, we pay as an agency directly back to the resident(s). The rate is also dictated by the term of the lease and the market. We may perform RCS's more frequently for those in shorter term leases but never less than annually. We also provide annual educational material via digital means to help insure all our residents are aware of this Bitcoin payment option and the benefits they may be foregoing by not participating.
As an added incentive to entice residents to pay with Bitcoin those who do will automatically be eligible to split any future price appreciation over and above the paid bitcoin 50/50 with the property anytime for up to 180 calendar days after they originally paid. They may execute this option at anytime during that 6 months and they will receive either a return in bitcoin or a rent credit equivalent to the 50% USD value over and above the original paid bitcoin.

Next comes the funding model - partnerships and collaborations - management plan  (inc. KPI's) to measure success

Thanks for reading :)



 