I'll take the bait.

One time I was trying to convince a friend that they should learn about bitcoin. To show them how easy it was, I helped them download a mobile wallet and sent them a little onchain. This was some years ago and I think they have since lost their seed phrase.

Last year, I wrote some things on Stacker News and got zapped a bit. I was using an ecash wallet and I don't know what kind of wallets the people who zapped me were using. Eventually I swept those tokens or credits or whatever you want to call them to my lightning node, and together with some other sats I earned via selling posters, eventually swept it all to an onchain wallet.

Sure, along the path there were all kinds of custodial things. For all I know, the people who zapped me and bought my posters were paying via an exchange or even some arcane wrapped bitcoin thing. I never checked. I ended up with sats. Amazingly, the sats I got for my posters and writing have increased in purchasing power by quite a lot.

I'm of the mind that all stages of that process were using bitcoin, but it sounds like you only think it became using bitcoin when it got to my cold storage and sat there. That doesn't make sense to me.

Bitcoin is digitally native money. I couldn't sell my posters as I do without bitcoin. I don't want to use credit cards or paypal because I'd have to give them a big cut and I'd have to completely kyc. Lucky for me, I can pay for my web hosting in sats as well, so I've never had to connect my legal identity to my bitcoin poster selling identity.

Same goes for Stacker News. I don't know of anywhere else that's using micropayments like they do here. The fact that I can pick up 10k sats occasionally by writing and posting something is excellent. I've made far more money on SN and nostr than I have ever made through X or Adsense or anything.

These seem to me to be novel ways to use money on the internet that are only enabled by bitcoin -- which I think is a pretty fair definition of using bitcoin.

Using Bitcoin is using it as money (as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account). Dismissing payments as irrelevant misunderstands the nature of money itself. When someone buys a coconut for sats, that’s Bitcoin in action — no matter the amount. Yes, we should aim for non-KYC usage and avoid fiat conversion, but rejecting payments as “not using Bitcoin” is deeply flawed. Zaps, purchases, and peer-to-peer exchanges are part of Bitcoin's circular economy. We don’t win by narrowing Bitcoin’s use case — we win by using Bitcoin as money, for everything. That’s real adoption.