{"id":5445,"date":"2025-11-13T05:16:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T05:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/13\/merchants-dont-read-white-papers-they-read-cash-flow-statements\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T05:16:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T05:16:09","slug":"merchants-dont-read-white-papers-they-read-cash-flow-statements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/13\/merchants-dont-read-white-papers-they-read-cash-flow-statements\/","title":{"rendered":"Merchants Don\u2019t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

Merchants Don\u2019t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

This is a cross-post from Spiral\u2019s blog, the original post can be found here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is everyday money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin\u2019s existence, there just haven\u2019t been many places to<\/em> spend it.<\/p>\n

But then, something happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Planets aligned, seas parted, nerds hooted and hollered from rooftops, and Block added support for bitcoin payments to millions of Square sellers, making bitcoin both ubiquitous and easy to activate. Suddenly, almost everyone is seconds away from accepting bitcoin payments. Pretty cool, right? Right?<\/em> Yeah, except how<\/em> merchants should accept bitcoin payments isn\u2019t the only problem. Why<\/em> merchants should accept bitcoin payments. That\u2019s the boogeyman we need to vanquish. It always has been.<\/p>\n

How we do this is more apparent and pragmatic than bitcoin tropes about digital scarcity and immutability, neither of which will convert someone running an ice cream shop. What will motivate small business owners to accept bitcoin payments is their bottom line. They\u2019re unlikely to be ideological; they\u2019re far more likely to be practical. And what\u2019s the most common problem in need of a practical solution faced by merchants that only bitcoin can solve in a digital-only world?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Credit card fees and the death of cash.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

Back when cash ruled everything around everyone, 3% credit card fees on every purchase were just a distant but frightening hypothetical. It was a better time to run a small business, a time when everyone carried cash, businesses universally accepted it, and margins were chonk. This is, obviously, no longer the case.<\/p>\n

And yet, this is where it gets interesting: credit card companies have been so successful at ridding the world of physical<\/em> cash that they\u2019ve created the perfect stage for the bitcoin-minded to make the case for digital<\/em> cash, a designation that still captures bitcoin\u2019s benefits better than any other. It seems obvious, yet it bears repeating: if a small business\u2019s profit margins are around 6%, which they frequently are, that means credit card fees might eat more than half their profits. Ooph, right? That\u2019s the reality for millions of merchants: ooph.<\/p>\n

This is all window dressing, of course, context written in the past tense so you can understand where we\u2019re coming from as we tell you where we\u2019re going.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

A universally true statement is that we trust the people we can relate to most. Small business owners, it naturally follows, will trust the experiences of other people running small businesses. This is why we\u2019re spearheading a peer-to-peer community exclusively for them, one that is bitcoin service-agnostic, to promote the idea of bitcoin as everyday money.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s called the Bitcoin Merchant Community or BMC for short. They\u2019ve got a website<\/a>, but more importantly, they also have a Facebook Group<\/a>. There, they\u2019ll find a like-minded community of business owners, both around the corner and around the globe, who want to take back the 3% they lose to credit card fees. They don\u2019t need to be on Square, either, because that won\u2019t work for everyone.<\/p>\n

However, getting the word out presents a problem: most small business owners are too busy and not yet invested enough to do the lifting necessary to jumpstart such a community. That\u2019s understandable, so what this initiative needs is passionate people to spread the word, people who are already invested, people who could really stand to get away from their computers for an hour or two.<\/p>\n

What it needs are bitcoiners<\/em>. Yes, you<\/em>, person reading this blog post.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

Bitcoin advocacy has been, up to this point, very<\/em> online. It makes sense: bitcoin is online, and online is where we all sort of live now. But for every level-headed and persuasive pro-bitcoin post that makes it into a non-bitcoiner\u2019s feed, there are 999 posts above and below attempting to suffocate it. Everything gets diluted online. Occasionally, something will break through and register with someone, only to be forgotten about five minutes later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because of this, we realized that thoughtful, focused in-person advocacy must play a central role in promoting bitcoin and the Bitcoin Merchant Community, advocacy that we think should come in two forms: regular in-person and weird in-person.<\/p>\n

Realistically, a customer showing up in person to talk about how bitcoin solves the problem of 3% fees? Memorable, definitely, though maybe a little ehhh. But a customer showing up in person with two impossible-to-ignore, straight-to-the-trash-resistant leave-behinds and a powerful, focused argument? Especially if that leave-behind is bright orange, cuddly, and just as grumpy about 3% credit card fees as merchants are? A leave-behind that can be used at the register by merchants to tell patrons that, \u201cyes, we accept bitcoin\u201d? Say what you will about the messenger, but they won\u2019t be forgetting the message, especially <\/em>when they learn that thousands of others like them got the same one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Free onboarding leave-behind kits are available starting today, directly from bitcoin hubs across the US. These include Presidio Bitcoin<\/a> in SF, The Space<\/a> in Denver, ATL BitLab<\/a> in Atlanta, and Bitcoin Park<\/a> in Nashville and Austin. We expect to be doing even more free kit giveaways in the near future, with more materials and creative assets for merchants that can be used to promote bitcoin acceptance.<\/p>\n

But maybe you\u2019re uncomfortable approaching strangers with a grumped out, eyebrow-laden, bright orange plushie under your arm? Not a problem. There\u2019s an approach for you, too. Just download a merchant onboarding playbook + one-page leave-behind combo pack<\/a> from the Bitcoin Merchant Community. You don\u2019t even need to engage, you can just drop the latter off. It\u2019s called a leave-behind for a reason.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ultimately, trillions of bitcoin transactions don\u2019t rest on the shoulders of the payer, but the payee. So grab a kit or print one out. Talk to a merchant. Help them with all the tech, if you want to. You\u2019ve already made bitcoin what it is, now it\u2019s up to all of us to make it what it could be: everyday money, cash in a digital age.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This post Merchants Don\u2019t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements<\/a> first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine<\/a> and is written by Spiral<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin Magazine Merchants Don\u2019t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements This is a cross-post from Spiral\u2019s blog, the original post can be found here. Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is everyday money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin\u2019s existence, there just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bitcoin"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digkrypton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}