Mbitcoiner on Nostr: Responding to: "What would it take for a major platform such as Meta, Shopify, or ...

Responding to:

https://x.com/spiral_xyz/status/2115099183132577976

"What would it take for a major platform such as Meta, Shopify, or OpenAI to accept bitcoin?"

You're asking the wrong question entirely and it reveals just how poorly Spiral (npub1spr…8s72) and much of the broader Bitcoin industry understand the problem they're actually trying to solve.

The problem with Bitcoin payments goes considerably deeper than insufficient demand or inadequate technology.

The existing commercial economy operates within an entire institutional architecture of fiat money, payment processors, regulatory regimes, usurious intermediaries, etc. that determine how people exchange value in the first place.

Yet the prevailing approach to Bitcoin payments seems to want to incorporate btc into this architecture on its own terms thru custodial services, KYC, regulated payments, and of course automatic conversion back into fiat.

I mean suppose Meta, Shopify, etc. accepted Bitcoin tomorrow. What exactly would we have accomplished if the underlying monetary architecture/relationships remained largely unchanged? We'd have introduced another payment instrument while preserving the institutional arrangements Bitcoin was supposed to make unnecessary.

And I am particularly skeptical of the enthusiasm for stablecoins as a "bridge" toward Bitcoin adoption. What reason do we have to believe that expanding the circulation of digital dollars will eventually produce demand for Bitcoin as money? Why wouldn't it simply reinforce dollar hegemony and extend the existing monetary order onto new technological infrastructure?

I mean really, there's an almost comical contradiction in trying to achieve monetary sovereignty by trying to make Bitcoin increasingly compatible with the institutions from which it was supposed to offer an escape.

It's becoming obvious to me that we're approaching the entire payments question backward. Rather than cultivating new economic relationships in which people earn, save, and exchange Bitcoin directly with one another, we seem to be preoccupied with convincing the existing financial establishment to accommodate it.

And this is precisely why I think the emphasis on demand is just dumb. Demand for money does not emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by the entire network of economic relationships, obligations, institutions, expectations through which people coordinate their lives. You cannot expect Bitcoin to become widely used as money simply by making it another checkout option within an overwhelmingly fiat denominated economy. Don't know what the "moonshot" is here, but understand that Bitcoin could become very successful as payment tech but accomplishing little in transforming the monetary order. Bitcoin industry needs to confront that possibility. We can not assume that every new integration, stablecoin rail or corpo partnership somehow moves us closer to Bitcoin standard.

We need to take time to explore what kinds of economic relationships Bitcoin makes possible that could not exist before, and how we begin building them.

That's where I'd direct the developers and builders to experiment. Stop begging and idolizing Meta and Shopify or whatever to accept Bitcoin. We need to be making their permission increasingly irrelevant!

OK I think that's all I wanna say.