Bitcoin Forum

There must be a reasonable way to promote it's use.

Wait for a second layer or sidechain that works with bitcoin to do payments with it.

Bitcoin is a store of value that puts security before speed. That isn't changing ever.

There are second and third layer solutions being worked on (many are aware of Litecoin) that are "planned" to be used to solve the payment issue.

The altcoin/sidechain will send the payment immediately and reconcile the users bitcoin later... allowing for the security of bitcoin and the scaling of payments without screwing up bitcoin.

Push its usefulness and the demand for it, these companies will answer to what their customers demand. If we as their customers push for payments to be accepted in bitcoin then with time they will adapt to that.

Do you know the adage: Show them the money!

When a customer pays using his/her Visa/Mastercard at a point of sale, the merchant is charged between 0.5% to 3% per transaction. It can even turn to be a loss for the small amount, (that's why the POS have a minimum payment like 10$/Tx). If you have an average of 1.75% per transaction this can represent a large amount of money on a company's income.

What about if a shop could increase its income by 2% per year just by using another payment means (it doesn't have to remove all others). And/or why not reducing the prices, or create jobs?

Thing is that using a sidechain would request to pay a fee on the bitcoin chain aswell and I dont think it's fair to pay for each single movement, which drives me to believe that it's not efficient to use the same chain for information/data storage, sort and inmutability needed and provided by bitcoin as the chain used by bitcoin which is mostly economic data storage.

For example, a project I liked from it's beginning is bitcrystals, you combine gaming and crypto economy in one thing, but I don't see a single chain (Bitcoin's) to host all that information as viable in long term future. This has been proven by ethereum.
Year's ago I read a post in this forum about researching better compression rates for everything stored on a blockchain but I don't think anything has come up.

I kinda forgot how sidechains work tho.

Another of Bitcoin probable increasing problem will be fees for transactions, I see bitcoin as a coin that will be used mostly by giant's to move big amounts of money and that day by day consumers will have a different option, not sure if lightning was supposed to help with that.
I guess that if bitcoin ever is adopted users will need to adopt a kind of financial identity to link with their wallets. For legal purposes hehe.

EDUCATE ! Educate how its better and how it could save them time and money!

One can try but it comes up to two general problems.
1- There is no consumer base right now. Adoption missing.
2- People is still very closed about it.

It really makes me boil when I hear the words "real money".

People don't see bitcoin's usefulness as we do then we need to make it usefull and attractive to their mortal point of view.

The main problem is that people just don't pay with Bitcoin that often.
I've recently read an article in a local newspaper where they interviewed a local gas station that recently started to accept Bitcoin in their shop.

In the 2 months that they've accepted Bitcoin, they had yet to see a single customer pay with Bitcoin.

We will surely reach that moment when small businesses is gonna adapt to this technology. With so much FUD circulating the net, it would be a gamble using bitcoin as mode of payment when its value is not in stable condition. The volatility of bitcoin's value is the issue as well as the scalability that's why small businesses who are looking for profit won't risk such mode of payment.

They can use methods I dislike provided by enough services that dump the recieved coins on sight and recieves FIAT. Volatility ain't really an issue, if you look at charts price has an ever going upward trend even if it has it's stays and downs, think of it's limited supply, price is bound to go higher and higher, which could be a problem for fees if we don't add decimals, with price at 20k I started having the feeling the need of a 0 added :P.

The fees problem isn't really a problem anymore. The Lightning Network will be the bridge for the small transactions. Even without LN, a merchant would surely prefer to pay $0.10 instead to up $3 per transaction. He will just have to change it's POS terminal to make it compatible Visa/Mastercard/Bitcoin/AMEX.

I am confident that introducing Bitcoin with the money as an argument is the best selling point

Show them the difference between paying with bitcoins and paying with credit cards. There's no real incentive in accepting bitcoin as payment apart from lower fees as opposed to credit cards. The merchant would also need to convert to cash ASAP and that's another area of consideration, too. If multiple payment processors similar to BitPay pop up and offer competive rates, perhaps merchants would consider.accepting bitcoins, but right now they're locked into accepting credit/debit cards and cash since they're the only viable options around.

this depends on the level of trust people have towards bitcoin. Because companies are very easy to apply the use of bitcoin in their business, what is difficult is building trust.
With the current conditions it will indeed be difficult because the bitcoin trend is negative.

Well i guess we can do this by letting these companies know the real importance of making transactions in bitcoin letting them know about the features and security that bitcoin transactions possess. Not forgetting the fact that it is very fast as compared to making transactions in banks.

There are numerous reasons why until now there are still small percentage of adoption, the first reason is the government regulation, some countries are banning crypto and some still got unclear regulation, the second reason is the volatility, the high volatility has made the owner confused to set the price, and since the swing is too high, it make crypto has suitable to be used as currency yet, bitcoin need to be more stable before it can be accepted in small company

by creating demand for their services!

you can not expect a business to start accepting bitcoin when you do not want to spend it, they obviously will never do it because there is no benefit in it for them when they have no customers spending bitcoin. but as people spend their bitcoins more and see it as a currency, little by little the companies see it as a currency and when they see the demand they will start accepting it too.

heres where i had some success

1. in your local area, form a meetup where people can discuss bitcoin.
2. ask them which small/independent retailers/services they use and try to find a common retailer/service you all use
3. find out who is good at speaking, who is a regular bitcoin buyer

now the simple part. agree on a upfront tab. (like a bartab)
go to the manager of the retailer/service and tell them at no cost to the retailer he can accept a new payment method and get free advertising.

now here is how it works

1. give the retailer /service a upfront bar tab in fiat. and a QR code of the guy thats a regular bitcoin buyer
2. tell the retailer/service that if any of the staff are asked if the customer can pay in bitcoin. say yes
3. demonstrate to the manager how to use a fiat/bitcoin calculator.
4. then show how the retailer just needs to sell the goods normally as cash on his system. but instead of asking for cash from the customer display the QR code and ask for the amount of BTC calculated.
then put the cash from the bartab into the cash register.
5. contact the town/city news/media and tell them you have a news story about a local retailer being the first retailer of your town/city to accept bitcoin.. and let them do all the leg work of interviewing and releasing the news locally

now here is why it works
1. the retailer has cash upfront. so no loss, no cost, no hassle, no risk to the retailer. confidence to give it a try is achieved
2. you already know a few bitcoiners will use that retailer so you know the retailer will notice the 'business' gained
3. shows how simple it is to ask for a amount of bitcoin
4. the regular bitcoin buyer will become the guy that refills the bartab while getting the btc from the retailer displaying his QR
5. media love a story about bitcoin at the moment. its one of their buzzwords that spark public interest so they will promote the business

you dont need to baffle the manager with techno-waffle. just show him the money, show him a bitcoin conversion calculator and hand him a QR code. thats it.

as time goes on the manager has time to learn about bitcoin and learn about the deflationary benefit of holding bitcoin. and may even decide to just run it himself without the regular buyer needed. thus cutting out the middleman conversion.

This could be a problem in some countries like India. In India it is deemed illegal rather it is banned to use any form of cryptocurrency as a means of exchange for any type of goods or services. Although this does prohibit trade in cryptocurrency. So, even if a business wants to use bitcoin they can't. I guess the applies for the US. Not sure about the US. You may want to check it once.

So technically speaking, it will start to us, its users to spend bitcoin and see it as a currency so in that way merchants will come to an idea that there's really something that bitcoin have., Though in reality, this will far to happen as long as the price getting unstable and people has their little hope that it wi significantly grow.

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Otherwise it should be a give and take process to achieve even not a mass adoption but at least acknowledgement.

Show them the advantages that Bitcoin has over other payment options. A merchant always have to worry about "Chargebacks" but with Bitcoin this is not possible, so this is a huge advantage for ecommerce.

The merchant also save on fees, because the Banks are not involved in pure Bitcoin payments. The added fees, when they use payment processors are less than what they pay in Banking fees.

Bitcoin also gives them financial freedom, because they can do business with whomever they want. <Not like when they use PayPal and you are told who and what kind of business is accepted by them.>  >:(

i think you should show them about the advantage of using bitcoin in their company, like it's a simple way to buy or sell and with bitcoin your identity is safe cause it can't be track. so you must convice them about what the use of bitcoin to their companies

They need to see the charts where bitcoin has a boom and bust cycle. If they accept now while prices are low they can triple their earnings when the boom markets return

of course, especially for authorities in that country, if the state has legalized it. it is not impossible that bitcoin will be adopted as a means of payment by the company without having to promote it

You cannot directly apply bitcoin to any company, even though we have seen that there are some companies that have used payment methods using bitcoin but I am sure that implementation will not be so effective, because there is still a lack of people who have bitcoin to transact in real life. The first thing to do is to make bitcoin legal globally, so many people will be aware of bitcoin and ready to use it wherever they are.