AI pushes the world toward infinite abundance, while Bitcoin is absolute scarcity.
As technology drives costs down, Bitcoin lets you store the value you create.
Together they point to a new way of living.
Full interview with Matthew McDonagh
For years, Bitcoin critics had one easy line when their arguments started to collapse.
“Bitcoin isn’t money. I can’t even buy a coffee with it.”
This week, that line died.
On Monday, November 10, Square flipped a switch and turned on Bitcoin payments for roughly 4 million merchants.
Overnight, every shop using a Square terminal to sell coffee, cut hair, or pour drinks suddenly had the ability to accept Bitcoin with a single setting in their dashboard.
They did not have to spin up a node or buy a hardware wallet.
Within hours, the videos started pouring in.
A latte in Washington, D.C.
Beer in Oregon.
Payments from Hawaii to Miami, all settling instantly over Lightning.
From the customer’s perspective, it felt no different than paying with a phone.
From the merchant’s perspective, it was faster than Visa, with no 3 percent card fee eating half the profit on a $10 sale.
And then came the breakthrough almost everyone missed.
You can now “pay in Bitcoin without paying with Bitcoin.”
If you use Cash App, you probably have dollars.
At the register, if a merchant prefers Bitcoin, you scan the QR code, the app converts your USD to sats behind the scenes, routes the payment over Lightning, and the merchant can choose to receive dollars, Bitcoin, or a mix of both.
The customer never has to touch Bitcoin and the merchant still gets all the benefits.
Square’s parent company, Block, is not some tiny startup.
They processed $241 billion in payments last year.
They serve 4 million sellers and 58 million Cash App users.
More than 90 percent of their volume runs through small businesses with fewer than 10 employees, exactly the people crushed by card fees and the slow death of cash.
For those merchants, credit cards are a heavy tax on every sale they make.
If your margin is 6 percent and the card network takes 3 percent, half your profit disappears.
For years, Bitcoiners tried to orange pill store owners with talk of digital scarcity, the 21 million hard cap, or the history of fiat debasement.
None of that matters to someone running an ice cream shop trying to make payroll and pay rent.
What matters to them is simple.
“How do I keep more of every sale?”
Square just gave them an answer.
This is what real adoption looks like.
Not a zombie company issuing shares to sell “Bitcoin exposure.”
Real payments at real businesses where margins matter and where Bitcoin solves a real problem.
I myself convinced the local guy who sells coffee from his van to accept Bitcoin payments, and bought an Americano from him on Friday with sats.
Bitcoin started as a cypherpunk experiment.
Then it became “digital gold,” a store of value for those who saw the coming debasement.
Now it is stepping into its next role as a medium of exchange.
As everyday money.
You no longer have to convince someone to understand macroeconomics for them to want Bitcoin.
You only have to show them how, with one setting, they can keep 2 percent more on every sale, eliminate chargebacks, and open their door to millions of customers who want to pay over Lightning.
The thought process becomes simple.
“If I am already accepting Bitcoin, maybe I should hold a little. Just in case it catches on.”
Bitcoin just moved one giant step closer to becoming what it was meant to be.
Rather than a 2% allocation on a brokerage app, a peer-to-peer digital cash and the financial rails beneath everyday life.
