Two years ago, I used to get paid in Bitcoin. It took up to four days to sell it!
Why did it matter so much?
I wish I could express the feeling of waiting four days just to book the flight tickets and hotels with Bitcoin for my travel. The number of times I had to cancel plans because it was just not possible to use Bitcoin to travel.
Every time I ran out of my Euro savings nearing the end of the month, I borrowed from my friend because my Bitcoin salary and savings were locked up in my hardware wallet. I almost felt useless with this hurdle of being unable to liquidate.
It took 3-4 days to convert my Bitcoin to Euros and get it into my bank account after going through Binance’s horrible UX and paying hefty fees. I was unsure if I would receive it, fearing that my bank could freeze my account.
The situation was frustrating; I had to get paid in euros and buy some BTC by the end of the month if I had any salary left. Ironically, even in 2021, finding a solution that helped me do the fundamental process of reliably liquidating my Bitcoin was challenging.
So I start project Bringin.
It took three times the time and four times the money I thought it would take
Bear market, building in a highly regulated space, being kicked out of the EU (cos my visa was attached to employment), and working remotely from India, building a startup for the first time with no co-founder made it a little harder than it should have been.
Today, we are super happy.
We enabled support of lightning last week, Which means:
- I can get Bitcoin from my self-custody Bitcoin wallet to my bank account in less than a minute with lightning and SEPA instant transfers.
- Reliable transfer - Each user is provided with a dedicated bank account, which means the bank transfers are 100% safe as the receiving banks see the transfers are coming from your own IBAN account
- Stress-free- The UX is streamlined to be a portal with two steps to sell Bitcoin from any wallet to receive Euros into any of my bank accounts.
- It works flawlessly in 31 European countries.
What does this mean to the Bitcoin community in Europe?
Like me, many get paid in Bitcoin or earn Bitcoin in many ways. They now would not have to go through the problems I faced. You’re welcome!
Planning holidays? Tap into your Bitcoin savings to book flight tickets and hotels without hiccups.
You can walk into any shop with only Bitcoin and be sure to make a purchase, even if the merchant does not accept Bitcoin.
Living on Bitcoin standards is now feasible with Bringin.
Get paid in Bitcoin, and spend some of it stack rest!
Self-custody is your wealth with no fear. You can use them anytime for any purpose.
Today, we are super happy.
Sign-up here: https://bit.ly/49I26vR
If SN will have more features and UI for long form writers, blogs, guides etc I would be glad to switch from substack to SN.
But we are long way to reach that phase. SN is still a baby. We need to take care of it and raise it in the right way, slowly.
I like this a lot (no surprise, since I probably have like a dozen series going).
I imagine the creator would either select specific stackers who can post in the series or leave it open to anyone, as well as making a similar choice about where it can be posted. We'd want the creator to be able to adjust those choices indefinitely.
The advantage of the series post type for the author would be inheriting an audience and perhaps working off of a template (plus the joy of contributing to something greater than oneself).
The advantage for readers would be less notification clutter and more tailored content subscriptions, as well as being able to easily find other entries in the series. I'm thinking there could be "Previous Entry", "Next Entry", and "Full Series" links at the bottom of each series post.
I don't think there would need to be anything different about fees or zap shares, though. These would essentially be independent posts as far as SN is concerned, with the exception of being able to see the whole series on a search/sort page.
Another step towards evergreen-ness, @elvismercury (you absentee son of a bitch).
https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin
How do you feel about adding some other categories to the Newsletter?
I was thinking about a few options while reading through:
Thinking about how to use AI to create a mind-exoskeleton for knowledge workers, designers, artists, engineers, etc. but wondering what that would look like for different industries.
Also in the end if AI can be used to generate content / answers along some calibrated "tracks" we still have the final decision of who decides? For example, in design / architecture / logistics / whatever field you still need to have someone or a group who decides.
So AI can workers in a variety of fields but the real crux is what range of activities / decisions are we comfortable with it making. We're still all thinking of it as a kind of conversation partner / recommender but in order for it to "replace" people in whatever arena, the results would have to be "good enough" as compared to some guy who has the current job, without weird glitched out edge cases where everything goes wrong. And we'd have to be comfortable "just letting it run" in that setting. I feel like an "AI babysitter" is going to be a big component of future jobs
Yes. Maria would notice her "lightning" transaction costs more than her friends who used a real lightning wallet because Maria's transactions are on-chain. She will especially care because so many people were suggested to use this wallet that Muun txs drop from the mempool (they use sent lightning payments without the necessary on chain confirmation) if muun does not raise the fee high enough to stay in the mempool. Eventually, poor Maria has to choose between paying really high fees, or waiting for things to calm down so she can transfer to a real lightning wallet, which she probably doesn't even know about because if the Bitcoiners, the people she deferred her knowledge to in regard to the best wallet software for her use case, told her about it, she would have been using that in the first place.