Johnny

Ask the owner of a small used bookstore what would stop her from taking bitcoin at the register, and I doubt she says anything about central banks.

She asks how she records a $12 paperback sale when the coin she got is worth $11.80 by Friday, and what her accountant puts in the books. Then there is the customer who brings the book back a week later and wants a refund.

Those are the real barriers for a merchant: accounting, price swings, refunds, staff training and getting the payment terminal to talk to the register. A merchant is anyone who sells something to a customer. A payment terminal is the box at the counter that takes the card or, here, shows the QR code.

Tools now exist for most of this. Some convert each payment to dollars on the spot, and some let the shop keep part of it in bitcoin. The sale can be logged in dollars at the moment it happens, which is what the accountant needs.

The case against me: customers rarely ask to pay this way, and fixing the back office does not create buyers who were never there.

That is fair. If shops with every one of these problems solved still turn bitcoin down at the same rate, then demand was the barrier all along, and I am wrong.

I still think the first talk with a merchant should be about the books.

If this matches what you hear from shop owners, Zap ⚡

Why would a small radio station plan for the day its founding grant runs out?

Say a town station started with a grant that pays the DJs, and the grant gets cut in half every four years. Today it covers almost everything. In twenty years it covers very little. Listener donations have to grow into that gap, or the station goes quiet.

Bitcoin works the same way. Miners run the machines that keep the ledger honest, and hashrate is the total computing power they point at the network. Each new block pays them two things. The subsidy is new bitcoin created by the protocol. Fees are what you pay to get your transaction into that block. The subsidy halves about every four years. That schedule is written into the code and nobody gets a vote on it.

So the question I keep asking is who pays the miners once the subsidy is small. My answer is fees, from people who need a final, settled payment and will pay for a spot in a block.

The case against me: fees are a small slice of what miners earn today, and many payments have moved to layers like Lightning that touch the chain only now and then. If fees stay small, fewer miners can afford to run, and the network gets cheaper to attack.

I take that seriously, and I could be wrong. If several halvings pass and fees still cover a tiny share of miner income while hashrate falls, the fee market did not grow up in time.

For now I watch the fee share of each block more closely than any headline.

If the radio station made the subsidy click, Zap ⚡

Three thousand taxi drivers can own their own cars and still take every fare from the same two dispatch apps. The drivers own the fleet. The apps decide the route.

Bitcoin mining has the same shape. Hashrate, the computing power that secures the network, sits in thousands of machines owned by thousands of people. Most of them join a mining pool, a group that shares rewards so income arrives in steady amounts. The pool also builds the block template, the list of transactions those machines work on. So a few pools can decide which payments get in line while owning very little of the hardware.

I count that as a real risk, and a separate one from a few people owning the machines. Selling hardware is slow and costly. Changing who builds the template is a software setting. Newer pool protocols such as Stratum V2 let each miner pick the transactions and still share rewards.

The case against me: if a few pools choose the transactions, the result looks the same as ownership, and that fix has existed for years while most miners never turned it on.

I take that seriously, and I still read this as fixable. I could be wrong. If years go by and most hashrate still mines on templates the pool builds, the fix exists only on paper.

So when I see a chart of pool shares, I ask who builds the template before I ask who owns the machines.

If the dispatcher picture helped, Zap ⚡