When Satoshi published the white paper, he named it: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It is clear that the original intention of Bitcoin was to herald a new decentralized digital form of money for payments without any trusted intermediary. Yet, we see the store of value (SoV) use case gaining far more initial traction than his electronic cash system. Why is that? Why has Bitcoin not exploded as a payment system? Digital payment technologies such as PayPal, Zelle, Venmo, WeChat Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and others appear to be far more popular as a payment option at retail stores and in the general economy than Bitcoin. Sure, we are still early. But there are more nuanced reasons worthy of exploration.
 
Retail and consumers are not ready. Bitcoin was developed outside of the system. All of the digital payment systems listed above simply offer a digitized version of the current monetary system. They made traditional payments easier and more efficient. One loads their credit card into the Apple Pay app on their iPhone and off they go, paying with dollars just like retail and consumers have been accustomed to transacting for decades. They took the existing financial system and digitized it. All of the financial rails remain in place.
 
There are hurdles for retail to start accepting Bitcoin: integrating clunky interfaces, tricky questions about sales tax and opaque banking requirements, new levels of security protecting private keys, navigating wallet set up, existing point of sales systems do not accept it, different jurisdictions have different regulations, staff training, and so on. It’s not a smooth process.
 
Regular folks also struggle with Bitcoin. It’s “techy”, there are negative associations with it due to “crypto” rug pulls, bad press, lots of FUD must be countered, and it’s complicated. It’s like getting online with a 14.4 kbps modem in 1997. And these factors lead to the chicken and egg paradox: retailers don’t want the trouble to accept Bitcoin if their customers are not using it. For mass adoption as an electronic cash system, retailers must accept it ubiquitously and folks need to acquire some Bitcoin and use it. But why acquire Bitcoin if it cannot be spent at the local shops? I conjecture that both retail and regular folks will be the last to adopt Bitcoin. So, is all hope lost? Absolutely not.
 
Besides the sovereign aspects of Bitcoin which are profound, Bitcoin has several properties that make it superior to the digital payment technologies listed above. Bitcoin combined with other protocols including NOSTR, the Lightning Network, and eCash working together as a protocol “stack” unlock capabilities that traditional electronic payment systems cannot compete with. And it is precisely these use cases that will lead to mass adoption of Bitcoin.
 
Micro-transactions: Using the stack, pennies or even fractions of a penny can be zapped to content creators on NOSTR enabled networks such as stacker.news. Zapping replaces Likes as a way to show appreciation and reward good content by transferring sats, usually tiny amounts of value to the content creator. I expect to see the concept of zapping to take root on the wider Internet. Likes just feel empty and cheap in comparison. NOSTR allows a social media persona to travel across platforms so that the followers and community that one painstakingly builds becomes transferrable to any other NOSTR enabled platform. This upends social media lock-in and gives content creators much more power and freedom. It is just a matter of time before a NOSTR enabled platform scales to challenge the incumbents like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. When such a platform emerges, and millions of people set up Lightning wallets, this will accelerate mass Bitcoin adoption.
 
A.I and the Internet of Things (IoT): The stack will enable micro-transactions and new economic models among devices including Generative A.I. enabled devices to pay for services autonomously. Bitcoin is open-source programmable money. It was built for automated payments. There are no KYC requirements for a device to create a Bitcoin wallet and then transfer and receive Bitcoin payments autonomously. How will the regulation burdened incumbent trad-fi system possibly compete with this level of freedom?
 
Streaming payments: “Pay as you go” models are about to get incredibly efficient with the stack and micro-payments. That is, streaming sats for digital products where payment is intricately linked to the precise number of bits have been deployed with video, music, gaming, and podcast streaming, but there is no reason why electricity, internet bandwidth, processing power and storage (Amazon AWS type services), and other digital and even non-digital but precisely metered services can be included. Examples range from water usage to a back-massage chair that can be used for exactly the amount of volume or time desired and paid for with precise value down to a single sat with billing increments in micro-seconds. The societal benefits of precision pay as you go services will be significant. Waste will be greatly reduced. Businesses capable of providing the exact amount of whatever is required will prevail over those that cannot. People and businesses will expect to pay only for exactly what they need and not one sat more. As these business models develop, more and more people will seek these efficiencies which cannot be easily provided with existing financial technologies.
 
Inverting the digital Ads business model: For many, the bane of the Internet and media are Ads. Why should Google and Facebook receive trillions in market value while monetizing our attention? With the scaling of the stack, and each individual equipped with a Lightning or Layer 2 wallet, advertisers can pay individuals directly in sat denominated micro-transactions to view their ads and interact directly with their customer/prospect base. We will see decentralization of advertising revenue rightfully flow into the wallets of the people who trade their time.
 
When masses of people now have a Lightning or Layer 2 wallet with sats on their device, retailers will finally capitulate for a piece of that pie and this is when the Bitcoin Adaption curve moves in the right direction.
 
We have a very bright future ahead as we pave the way to a Bitcoin standard.