This is a cross-post from Spiral’s blog, the original post can be found here.
Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is everyday money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin’s existence, there just haven’t been many places to spend it.
But then, something happened.
Planets aligned, seas parted, nerds hooted and hollered from rooftops, and Block added support for bitcoin payments to millions of Square sellers, making bitcoin both ubiquitous and easy to activate. Suddenly, almost everyone is seconds away from accepting bitcoin payments. Pretty cool, right? Right? Yeah, except how merchants should accept bitcoin payments isn’t the only problem. Why merchants should accept bitcoin payments. That’s the boogeyman we need to vanquish. It always has been.
How we do this is more apparent and pragmatic than bitcoin tropes about digital scarcity and immutability, neither of which will convert someone running an ice cream shop. What will motivate small business owners to accept bitcoin payments is their bottom line. They’re unlikely to be ideological; they’re far more likely to be practical. And what’s the most common problem in need of a practical solution faced by merchants that only bitcoin can solve in a digital-only world?
Credit card fees and the death of cash.
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Back when cash ruled everything around everyone, 3% credit card fees on every purchase were just a distant but frightening hypothetical. It was a better time to run a small business, a time when everyone carried cash, businesses universally accepted it, and margins were chonk. This is, obviously, no longer the case.
And yet, this is where it gets interesting: credit card companies have been so successful at ridding the world of physical cash that they’ve created the perfect stage for the bitcoin-minded to make the case for digital cash, a designation that still captures bitcoin’s benefits better than any other. It seems obvious, yet it bears repeating: if a small business’s profit margins are around 6%, which they frequently are, that means credit card fees might eat more than half their profits. Ooph, right? That’s the reality for millions of merchants: ooph.
This is all window dressing, of course, context written in the past tense so you can understand where we’re coming from as we tell you where we’re going.
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A universally true statement is that we trust the people we can relate to most. Small business owners, it naturally follows, will trust the experiences of other people running small businesses. This is why we’re spearheading a peer-to-peer community exclusively for them, one that is bitcoin service-agnostic, to promote the idea of bitcoin as everyday money.
It’s called the Bitcoin Merchant Community or BMC for short. They’ve got a website, but more importantly, they also have a Facebook Group. There, they’ll find a like-minded community of business owners, both around the corner and around the globe, who want to take back the 3% they lose to credit card fees. They don’t need to be on Square, either, because that won’t work for everyone.
However, getting the word out presents a problem: most small business owners are too busy and not yet invested enough to do the lifting necessary to jumpstart such a community. That’s understandable, so what this initiative needs is passionate people to spread the word, people who are already invested, people who could really stand to get away from their computers for an hour or two.
What it needs are bitcoiners. Yes, you, person reading this blog post.
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Bitcoin advocacy has been, up to this point, very online. It makes sense: bitcoin is online, and online is where we all sort of live now. But for every level-headed and persuasive pro-bitcoin post that makes it into a non-bitcoiner’s feed, there are 999 posts above and below attempting to suffocate it. Everything gets diluted online. Occasionally, something will break through and register with someone, only to be forgotten about five minutes later.
Because of this, we realized that thoughtful, focused in-person advocacy must play a central role in promoting bitcoin and the Bitcoin Merchant Community, advocacy that we think should come in two forms: regular in-person and weird in-person.
Realistically, a customer showing up in person to talk about how bitcoin solves the problem of 3% fees? Memorable, definitely, though maybe a little ehhh. But a customer showing up in person with two impossible-to-ignore, straight-to-the-trash-resistant leave-behinds and a powerful, focused argument? Especially if that leave-behind is bright orange, cuddly, and just as grumpy about 3% credit card fees as merchants are? A leave-behind that can be used at the register by merchants to tell patrons that, “yes, we accept bitcoin”? Say what you will about the messenger, but they won’t be forgetting the message, especially when they learn that thousands of others like them got the same one.
Free onboarding leave-behind kits are available starting today, directly from bitcoin hubs across the US. These include Presidio Bitcoin in SF, The Space in Denver, ATL BitLab in Atlanta, and Bitcoin Park in Nashville and Austin. We expect to be doing even more free kit giveaways in the near future, with more materials and creative assets for merchants that can be used to promote bitcoin acceptance.
But maybe you’re uncomfortable approaching strangers with a grumped out, eyebrow-laden, bright orange plushie under your arm? Not a problem. There’s an approach for you, too. Just download a merchant onboarding playbook + one-page leave-behind combo pack from the Bitcoin Merchant Community. You don’t even need to engage, you can just drop the latter off. It’s called a leave-behind for a reason.
Ultimately, trillions of bitcoin transactions don’t rest on the shoulders of the payer, but the payee. So grab a kit or print one out. Talk to a merchant. Help them with all the tech, if you want to. You’ve already made bitcoin what it is, now it’s up to all of us to make it what it could be: everyday money, cash in a digital age.
