What can you do for Bitcoin? – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Stephan Livera, host of the “Stephan Livera Podcast” and CEO of Swan Bitcoin International. It is an article adaptation of his speech for BitBlockBoom 2022 in Austin, Texas.
We are living through a time of enormous change and money is broken. But on the bright side, we have this monetary technology, Bitcoin. On the downside, many people don’t understand the point of Bitcoin because they are caught up in fiat thinking.
Consider this short GIF above. Are bitcoiners like this man useless “pushing the train?” Does everything just happen no matter what we do?
Is Bitcoin Inevitable?
Sometimes the way people talk about it on Bitcoin Twitter is that “Bitcoin is inevitable” and this raises an interesting question. Is it? In what sense? Can we all just sit back and do nothing?
Not exactly. Bitcoin still needs things to sustain itself as a system: code review and maintenance, miners who secure the system, users and HODLers who give it value. Perhaps in some aggregate sense, Bitcoin is not quite inevitablebut it is extremely likely to win based on certain qualities, e.g. scarcity, neutrality, transparency, etc. But regardless of whether Bitcoin is inevitable or not, it is very dependent on real people doing the things that sustain the system.
So what can you do?
You can drive adoption or technological progress in and around Bitcoin. You also don’t have to be a developer to contribute. You can:
- Test, review and provide feedback on Bitcoin apps. Many have a community of developers and users in Telegram chats or Mattermost servers.
- Organize or contribute to your local Bitcoin meetup
- Invest in Bitcoin companies or work in them
- Do foreign language translation of influential Bitcoin content
- Finance Bitcoin development and review
- Get published in non-Bitcoin media to spread the word outside of Bitcoin circles
Normalization of Bitcoin
Don’t underestimate the power of normalizing bitcoin usage among your friends. As a quick example, if you’re out to dinner with friends/family and one person picks up the bill paying in fiat, you can offer to set them up on a Muun, Breez or Phoenix wallet and pay them back over Lightning. There is a chance that this accumulation of effort over time helps trigger “bitcoin greed” in that person. At best you can create a new Bitcoin HODLer/stacker.
Or do you have friends and family abroad to whom you send money? Don’t be afraid to use bitcoin to do that and let them sell that bitcoin for cash in their local markets if they need to. There is a good chance that they can sell bitcoin for a small premium in their local markets. Or they can use coupon sites like Bitrefill.com to indirectly spend bitcoin on what they need.
Another idea is to find a local cafe or bar where you regularly host your Bitcoin meetup and offer to take bitcoin payments. If you provide it with revenue in the form of paying customers, it will be more inclined to give you the time of day. Remember, Breez has a built-in POS mode that store owners can easily install and use as an app on their phone or tablet. Or, of course, for larger setups, they can use the likes of OpenNode or IBEX Lightning payment solutions. For non-custodial setups, if they are tech savvy, you can setup BTCPay Server.
Being upfront about where we are
We are just so, so early in bitcoin usage. I realize I sound like a broken record when I say this, but it’s really true for how many users there are globally.
Especially if we are talking about non-custodial use, the number of UTXOs as I write this in August 2022 is somewhere around 85 million. This is actually an upper limit for non-custodial Bitcoin users. Of course, there will be some custodial users whose IOU coins are represented by some platform, and there will be users who hold many UTXOs, so the real number of unique Bitcoin on-chain users will be far less than 85 million in a world of nearly 8 billion people.
Source: Blockchain.com
For this reason, it can be difficult to gain traction in bitcoin payments, as very few people globally even have bitcoins to make payments with. But this is also an opportunity to grow the scene and build the peer-to-peer economy of bitcoin users.
Technology adoption and public attitudes
Coming back to the idea of Bitcoin’s inevitability, public attitudes toward Bitcoin matter to Bitcoiners. While the Bitcoin project may live on, individuals may suffer if they are singled out by the authorities. Additionally, the many people who suffer from high inflation or financial censorship today will continue to suffer if Bitcoin is not reasonably available.
An interesting historical parallel might be the way ideas changed history that enabled the Industrial Revolution. In her “Bourgeois Equality” series, Deirdre McCloskey argues that it was ideas – and liberal notions of equality and dignity – that did this. Cultural attitudes towards merchants and trade changed, and this in turn enabled a massive increase in human prosperity and living standards over the last hundred years. Big ideas can really move the needle and the Bitcoin community’s idea, digital sound money, is one of the biggest.
Or consider another analogy – if nuclear technology is criminalized, humanity is less able to reap the benefits of nuclear power. And remember that nuclear power requires an ecosystem of engineering talent to sustain it as well. Likewise, Bitcoin requires humans to maintain it and promote it.
So ideas and culture really change the world and you can contribute to Bitcoin without necessarily being a developer.
So let’s all go ahead and push the train!
This is a guest post by Stephan Livera. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
