A personal BTC payment story (or, why BTC can never be global cash)...

I know I'm preaching to the choir but I got so pissed today during my BTC payment that I wanted to write a note about it.

A lot of us gave up on using BTC as a payments tool a long time ago, so while we know it's terrible and we can point to confirmation times and fees, there's nothing like personally experiencing it once or twice to remind you just how awful it really is and the magnitude of the damage caused by the vacuous morons who run the Twitter mobs that stopped BTC from scaling.

Backstory

One of my goals for 2021 is to reduce my exposure to fiat and traditional banking as much as possible. Reasons should be obvious to anyone looking around. Most of the world spent the last year under house arrest and we learned just how willing people are to accept Orwellian takeover of all areas of our lives. The mixed economy is revealing itself more than ever to be what Steve Patterson called today "the extended State," censoring information, canceling accounts, de-personing people, all in all serving the ends of totalitarianism around the world. Scary times, so I think one is being irresponsible in not reducing their risk surface here.

The three forks of Bitcoin (BCH, BSV and BTC) make up a large portion of the strategy in achieving that goal, so obviously being able to pay with them without converting to fiat on an exchange (an attack surface) is very important.

For any kind of commerce, 9/10 I use BCH and my Bitcoin.com wallet. It's awesome. You use it once and you realise big-block Bitcoin is the best payments tool ever created. BSV works great too but it doesn't have anywhere near the adoption that BCH has in payments and Craig's shenanigans make it increasingly unlikely companies are going to integrate it because who wants to deal with people like that?

Today

Today I had to pay with BTC. I don't do it too often but in this particular case there was a giftcard I needed to buy that was only available on BitRefill as far as I could tell. I paid for the $400 card + a $17.50 fee, waited an hour then drove a half hour to the store. I was in the store for another hour but when it came time to pay the transaction still hadn't confirmed.

I waited another half hour and meanwhile I'm on Twitter reading idiots in the Bitcoin Mini space talking about how everyone needs to buy Bitcoin (BTC) to escape companies like Robinhood censoring your economic activity and you just can't help but scream inside a bit because BTC literally cannot handle many more people trying to join to escape this BS. I paid roughly a 5% fee on my transaction and still can't buy anything at the store after several hours. It gets much, much worse from here. You'd see confirmations taking weeks and weeks, or months, if all the economic activity around GameStop lately tried to join BTC to escape economic censorship.

And of course the added irony is that it is 100% censorable. It's not just that everyone is going to have to use custodial payment options, or that fees are going to be so high only banks and Michael Saylor (who has probably never used Bitcoin) will use the chain, it's also that the wait period for confirmations will have a similar chilling effect that economic censorship has.

I waited...and waited...but I was on a pretty tight schedule so I decided to just pay with credit card like all the Bitcoin Minimalists tell you to. I drove home and in total it's been nearly six hours and there's still no confirmation.

Sure, sure I could have a "lower time preference..." like the Minimalists say, and I'm all about that, but in this case the purchase was time sensitive! Dead economic time like that really costs a lot of money and it can do a lot of other personal damage. Couldn't wait.

Conclusion

So now I've got $400 on my credit card and a $400 gift card (plus fees) I have no use for that I still can't spend, and I'm lucky I can afford it but keep in mind a few things:

- The fee alone can buy people several meals in countries that need it most.

- Most people today would just have to wait until the transaction finally did confirm because it would be too expensive to eat the cost twice by paying with a credit card after the fact. Economic activity slows accordingly.

- Slow confirmation times are an attack opportunity for state actors. Not everyone has the luxury of having a low time preference.

They say Bitcoin isn't for buying coffee but if it's not for $400 payments either then what good is it? Interbank transfers?

This is not the revolution that got many of us so excited years ago.

I said "one of my goals for 2021 is to reduce my exposure to fiat and traditional banking as much as possible," and I know I'm not alone in this goal, but that is impossible to achieve on BTC because it has been artificially rate limited by dummies, trolls and saboteurs. Minis pushing that dream are living in a fantasy. It's never going to happen.

Living off of Bitcoin and the damage Core did

Big-block Bitcoin is the obvious choice, but right now we're stuck with the unfortunate reality that BTC is the market leader and both BCH and BSV, and just about everything else, have lost significant value vs BTC, and best money needs to not only be good for payments but also storing value against other assets.

It's just a sad fact that it's hard to fully live off BCH if it's not yet a good store of value. But from my own experience today it's clearly impossible to live off BTC now. I make quite a few transactions everyday and I can't wait 5+ hours every time. Forget about the fees.

So looking at it all in whole, you can begin to see the damage that was really done. Bitcoin was split into a mainstream version that is entirely useless as a payments tool but has the network effect and branding that gives it the kind of price appreciation that attracts more people, and a less mainstream version that is amazing for payments but struggles against a 1000 alt coins for network and market share which makes it less useful and less threatening.

Hard to believe that wasn't intentional.....

Now more than ever people are looking for ways to opt out of the current system, but we just aren't there yet. We would be if BTC had just raised the blocksize years ago. We'd have a true digital store of value that was incredible for moving any amount of money around the world at fast speeds and low costs. But god I hope we get there soon before the dark suits start shilling for a Digital USD which will of course be a horrible thing for freedom everywhere and might also suck a lot of the life out of crypto for some time.

Keep building BCH!