Busting The Myth That Bitcoin is Not Spendable

There are many stories that have been told about Bitcoin by its proponents.

That it is a hedge against inflation, a bulwark against authoritarianism, a saviour for people living in broken monetary regimes, etc.

What is not a story is that Bitcoin is a distributed computer network with a shared database and a protocol that defines who can join as a peer and which among existing peers can alter this shared database.

All the stories that we tell each other that it is the best money, a grid stabiliser, a pristine collateral, a store of value etc. are emergent based on how the network and its protocol is interpreted and used over the years by its peers.

Moreover, the thing about these stories is that they are bigger than one person or company. They are emergent, formed over many years, mainly by repetition and clever alterations in narration, and backed by a certain degree of evidence.

You can alternatively call these stories memes, axioms, myths, maxims or religious tenets based on your presupposition towards them. At the end of the day, you can’t deny that they are quite powerful, no matter what you call them.

One such powerful story is that Bitcoin is not spendable, or that people are not willing to spend it, and never will be.

We won’t pretend to know why or how this story has emerged, but based on our conversations and observations, we think the following are a few reasons why:

Bitcoin’s market price has increased multifold since it started trading on the public market over a decade ago.

Its supply is limited, predictable and unalterable.

Its exchange price is volatile, owing to low liquidity and under-developed market infrastructure.

It is not widely accepted as money.

With these things in mind, and probably ones we are not aware of, it has often been posited that Bitcoin will never be something that people will spend in exchange for goods and services, eventually leading to the emergence of a myth that Bitcoin is not spendable.

We’d like to challenge that myth, and bust it.

Not only is it possible to make Bitcoin spendable, it is also necessary.

Bitcoin cannot be a serious monetary good if it is not widely accepted in exchange for goods and services. So we want to focus on solving that particular problem that makes Bitcoin not spendable.

This is not to say that the network is any real danger if this remains the case, but it just doesn’t align with our vision for what Bitcoin can be, as we mentioned in our previous article: a unified, interoperable, open source, privacy-preserving payments layer for all of Europe.

To get there, we need tools that make it as easy as possible for people to spend their Bitcoin at any store or website.

It is with this belief that we are building our product that enables you to convert your Bitcoin into Euros in less than a minute and buy things at any store, online or offline.

You can either spend your Bitcoin with our product by creating a one-time usable virtual debit card with our app or you can get Euros delivered directly to your IBAN account via an instant SEPA transfer from our app, and proceed to use a payment method of your choice.

This effectively makes your Bitcoin stack spendable with barely any effort required from your side and also without requiring you to give up custody of your Bitcoin or your Euros, except at the time of conversion.

We don’t want to challenge widespread beliefs by propagating our own counter-narratives and memes. Instead, we want to build useful things by listening to the free market and making thoughtful decisions about how we want our product to evolve based on users’ feedback.