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Why would a business with existing infrastructure for payment systems that have existed for 20+ years continue to use their currently existing payment infrastructure as a settlement method for their vast majority of customers instead of building a brand new infrastructure for a small minority of customers 🤔? Love it, or hate it but the square update is probably the best way to make it friendly for businesses to accept Bitcoin.

I appreciate both Jack & Square for this great launch and also DarthCoin for his continuous shaming of anything that's not self custody (from his sovereign mud house no less). 💜

Yes! This!

I am not talking about what Square did. From their POV is perfectly fine and is a good thing. But my question is about the merchants. Complacency in using an old fiat system is not an excuse.

The "Bitcoiners" you get through that are weak and lazy. They fight more for the system then they fight against it. Tracking. Logging. Taxing. Soveriegnity is something most people are not interested in. They came here to die without standing their ground. Choose your allies wisely is all I can say as someone who is aligned probably 95% with you. With the single exception that I choose Bitcoin and Monero together, partially because I can not stand the fools that have amassed themselves around Bitcoin that never will use it in a private and self-custodial way. But maybe that's just Darwinism at work.

I am not shaming Square. Square did a great move from their company's POV. Nothing against that. Yes, it helps a lot for more bitcoin adoption. My question was about the merchants in particular and also about their users. All these years merchants and bitcoiners never made any move to help those merchants to accept BTC? You can't say that we do not have plenty of solutions for them. Why they need to wait for Square to add BTC? I think this is more of lack of push of education from bitcoiners side, because let's be honest, most of US bitcoiners prefer ETFs and VISA cards loaded with sats than go to merchants and push them to use BTC. I would like to see now all those bitcoiners that until now were using VISA cards, how they spend sats on these Square merchants that decide to keep the sats.

Your Bitcoiner friends are LARPERs. Never in their lives have they learned to act against "authority". People that joined BTC post 2016 are herd followers. They claim to be maxis when IRL they are pussies. Many merchants and entrepreneurs are not any different. They are just the lap dogs of government running state licenced companies as if that's necessary to conduct business in a consensual way.

Regulation around the world is making private crypto transactions illegal. For transparent crypto transactions they have super low fiat limits without KYC. Soon you will only be able to use crypto on the black market. Monero people are preparing for that scenario, while Bitcoin LARPERs still celebrate ETFs and KYC adoption.

🔥🔥🔥❗️

We thought it was the tech, so we tried to teach them. Then we made the tech easier & tried to show them. And it got easier, so much easier. Seems what they really didn't want was getting stuck with magic internet money. You can't force people to understand & value something. Perhaps make it even easier & more convenient then allow them to convert it to slave tokens. People want to focus on their business & are tied up with a whole bunch of fiat bullshit. Less fees with minimal additional effort or complexity? - yeah merchants are interested in that. This is good for everyone except Visa.

Hey Jack why the ₿ for sats?

Sorry I just saw you answered that question in another note. Thx! Onward. 👍

Americans won’t start spending until IRS changes its rules. Most people wanna stay tax-compliant.

How many times we have to tell to muricans that IRS is a scam?

Most Merchants don't even understand how Bitcoin works, and they probably don't even understand how square terminals work either but are forced to learn since the alternative was not getting any money. Bitcoin has been around since 2009 but only recently has started becoming usable for most real world stores. You need to realize most people aren't you Darth, most people aren't earning $100,000+/year as a dev with 120+ IQs, most business are ran by people that most of their funds disappear as soon as they come in, and probably have 100 to 110 IQs. Most merchants are probably well into their 50s, and 60s, and have been living off of fiat their whole lives. If you want to help Bitcoin stop thinking like a 20 year old white dude, and start thinking like a Boomer, or an African, and see what would change that mindset. People will only build the infrastructure once they see the utility for it, and Square is showing, and teaching people that Bitcoin has utility by meeting them where they're at because the alternative is no adoption. I hate fiat rails as much as you do too but I use Flexa, and other fiat mechanisms too for Bitcoin sometimes because businesses won't fully commit unless they see the investment being worth it. And yes Bitcoin infrastructure is cheaper, and easier but unfortunately right now most businesses have to operate on fiat. Square changes the game though, it simplifies the process, and let's the two currencies compete, and overtime businesses will give preferential treatment to Bitcoin once they see the benefit to them.

>If you want to help Bitcoin stop thinking like a 20 year old white dude That sounds like a bitter, gay comment...!! What does it matter if he thinks like a white person or a black person?

Most, if not all of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin have been disproportionately high earners 110+ IQ 20 to 30 year old libertarian white men in a western country.

If Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency users want adoption we need to start thinking like 60 year old Black women because otherwise Bitcoin/Crypto isn't going anywhere.

You blame the "early adopters" when all these early adopters were screaming for the last 16 years about Bitcoin and were ignored. If you want to cry, cry, but don't blame me for your past mistakes. Now you cry because Saylors are grabbing the remaining BTC...

Ah, yes, of course… because according to the “experts,” to understand Bitcoin you have to be a white man with an IQ of 110, live in a Western country, and eat neoliberalism for breakfast. I arrived late, I'm neither a genius nor a millionaire, but at least I understood something: Bitcoin doesn't ask for pedigree, only that you understand freedom… and that you stop crying over useless statistics.

I thought Bitcoin was about freedom and decentralization, not about filling social quotas. If you continue with that thinking, we'll have to change the Bitcoin logo from orange to black or pink.

I'm just saying for something that's supposed to free the masses from fiat slavery it's done sure of a hell of a job at ensuring the fiat slavery status quo continues on. The underdogs didn't win from Bitcoin/Crypto. The people who were already on top have won. Bitcoin was supposed to level the playing field, and remove banking barriers, and increase financial access but instead has become a CBDC-lite with Bitcoin being KYC'd at every point. Want to buy a miner, KYC'd. Want to join a pool, KYC'd. Want to use a Wallet, KYC'd. Want to Use Lightning, KYC'd. Want to Off sell for fiat, KYC'd. And yes, I know use BitAxe Solo Miners with a Foss Wallet, Buy KYC-Free P2P, and Use Zeus, etc., etc. but people aren't going to use the principled way, since it's implementation costs are higher. Convenience ALWAYS WINS! It's just easy to snap a picture of your ID than spend 10+ hours fiddling around with Linux, and potentially losing your funds. And I'm saying Bitcoin could work but we need to develop tools with the normies in mind. The normies are old low income ethnic minority women, all of us using Bitcoin today we're the outliers, or to use communist terms the bourgeoisie, we're not the proletariat in relative to everyone else.

It isn't an excuse, but most people don't try to look for better opportunities, even the semi-entrepreneurial ones who form small businesses, until it becomes so obvious that they'll die without it that they finally get motivated. Most people stay ignorant.

Yes, it is but you can't be decentralized if you don't make tools for the lowest common denominator.

The classic "Bitcoin failed because people don't use it the way I want" argument. Brother, Bitcoin didn't promise to make you coffee or teach you how to use Linux. It promised freedom, and freedom includes people choosing convenience if they want. KYC? Yes, the system tries to get its claws in, as always. But the code is still there, free, resilient, running 24/7—nothing has changed. It's not Bitcoin's fault that most people prefer convenience over sovereignty. So no, Bitcoin didn't fail. It just proved that the biggest enemy of freedom isn't the system... it's laziness.

The tools are there, you already mentioned them in another comment; our job is to educate people, not to complain that people don't use them.

Yeah.. or they could start thinking like libertarian men.

Dude, the masses are not interested, the masses don't understand and the masses don't care, and that's why they are the masses. Plenty of us have been preaching the gospel for almost 20 years now. 9.99 out of 10 times people won't listen and they won't go educate themselves, they will look around and copy the response of the people around them. We're outliers. I don't say it in an arrogant way. I'm just saying, when you accept that you think differently and therefore act differently and therefore will get different results, you will understand: this is real fairness, cause and effect. The network is open to all. It's not my fault that almost no one even wants to try to understand why it exists and what it's for. That's their loss, and it was their free choice, as it was mine to do the opposite.

It's easier for a higher frequency creature to move to a lower level than for a lower frequency creature to increase its frequency. We need to lower our frequency to drag people up with us. It's all about energy input/output, buy nodes, and hardware wallets for people, gift them Bitcoin, give them lightning liquidity, because they won't do it themselves. Bitcoin grows by replication rather than self-starters since the fiat mindset has destroyed the self-sufficiency/self-starting mechanism in people. Bitcoiners need to be the primer/fuel that starts the fire with incentives because no one in their right fiat mind is going to spend $10,000+ just to run a slightly more better money system when the current money systems works just fine, only downside is inflation but normies don't care since they don't understand inflation, they just see it as needing more money.

This is good

Wait... does Square not impose any processing fees???

Oh wow, saw another post that mentioned indeed no processing fees. That's crazy.

Do you need a phone with headphones jack to accept Bitcoin?

Nope.

1K bounty to the first person who can answer this with proof to back them up.

No. The merchant must fill out kyc and accept bitcoin payments. They must have the right app in the right mode.

i can get you screenshots from a square dashboard tomorrow. the merchant has to go into their settings and enable it at the account level and then also manually include it in checkout options per POS or "device mode" grouping.

no, merchant has to enable it explicitly

More KYC. More doxxing. More taxes. Bitcoiners these days are not the brightest lights. They are celebrating state licenced companies eroding the last piece of privacy. There are only 2 or 3 honourable Bitcoin businesses (BTCPayServer, Trezor) among thousands of government boot lickers (Coinbase, Binance, Square, Strike, Bitcoin Bull, Bitpay, Ledger, Blockstream...). The enshitification of Bitcoin is accelerating with every company that captures the "p2p ecash system without third parties". If you don't use Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way you are the problem. Why would I bother using KYC non-custodial BTC when I just can use fiat that is accepted everywhere? SoV sure. Nice! But we're not there yet and likely never will be since most people see BTC as a fiat multiplier and as soon as SHTF they will all call home their speculative investments out of necessity. KYC means social credit.

I missed this promise (thanks for the reminder @Dr. Hax ) because I wasn't able to get to my friend's dashboard today. Please accept this markdown dump of the square support page article as penance (url to the original article in the archive below):

Accepted. Thank you for tracking that down

Right! This just makes it easier for normies to begin accepting Bitcoin... I've be accepting it since 2021 officially.

They never had any of this to accept bitcoin payments, I agree. But this is a excellent tool for normies and clueless people touch the protocol for the first time as it was made for, no begin using it as an asset iou for fiat or other “fix L2” bs.

even after setup, bitcoin payment as a payment option only appears in the Square Point of Sale app in POS mode. bitcoin payments don't appear even after setup if using Square Retail or Square Restaurant.

100% covered by capital gains taxes, an accounting nightmare. I'm not spending a single satoshi except for zaps on NOSTR.

That's why you convert everything into Bitcoin so you have no choice but to spend it.

It's just about education.. at minimum, it is nearly seemless and free to buy Bitcoin and pay with it instead of fiat (thereby exercising the Bitcoin payment rails, while also not touching the stack. Also keeps it clean from a tax perspective until that gets changed too.

This is the way

People who are 100% in. If you have fiat to spend, then you have too much fiat

People who are 100% in. If you are too worried to spend bitcoin, the problem is you have too much fiat

Could always use bitcoin to pay so that you're a part of the network growth and then buy back 1x, 2x, 4x or 8x ect as much? Would be great if @Cash App or @strike included an automatic option for this too.

If fiat is so bad why did you hold it? Exchange everything for sats and expend it wisely.

I want to be 100% in BTC, but I can't do that without the damn state taking 32% of my assets. You would need to do this Face to Face using paper money, no one in their right mind would do that in Brazil

They only take it if you treats it as iou fiat. When you use it as money they can’t do nothing about it. Trabalha na adoção local.