Because it isn't today, not at all.
President Trump wants to declare the US the "crypto capital" of the world but it is nowhere near that - the actual use of Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) to actually purchase goods and services in the US is extremely uncommon. It's not just that it's niche... it's extremely uncommon.
Sure there is Steak n Shake and it is AWESOME but it is the only chain business that I know of that has integrated Lightning (with very positive revenue) and I constantly look on storefronts to see if they have "Bitcoin" or "Lightning" stickers in place and they...
Just don't.
What gives?
I have used Lightning is several European countries, and for all the griping and criticisms of Europe among some in the Bitcoin community (over-regulation, red tape, a regarded ECB) there is WAY MORE actual Bitcoin adoption in Western Europe than in the United States.
Switzerland has A LOT of places to spend Bitcoin, Lugano obviously is amazing but in other cities there are grocery stores, coffee shops, small art galleries etc... Switzerland is embracing it albeit slowly but they are.
There is far more adoption in Germany, more in the Netherlands, more in Czech Republic, more in several European countries than there is in the United States by a significant margin.
As a matter of fact, the most prevalent Bitcoin adoption is in REALLY poor places like South Africa and El Salvador, where people actually need 'sound money' they can have on a phone.
Americans just want an ETF... they have no idea the dollar has lost ~%9 of its value against other currencies this year helping to make everything they buy more expensive contributing to inflation + debasement. (This ultimately makes Americans poorer).
Sure "gold is up" but it is utterly impossible to "spend gold" on a coffee, over the internet, on an internet forum or for anything really. What are you going to do, peel off little flakes of gold while the merchant weighs them in front of you??? How do you "email" (you can't obviously) a small piece of gold to your friend in Taiwan?
Bitcoin's "Transactional Captial" concept is (to me at least) an overwhelming technological and economic achievement, with overwhelming economic impact and necessity...
and yet the understanding of that impact is just so limited.
Most of the people in "cryptocurrency" are just tourists, Lightning is NEVER under any circumstances mentioned in the "financial press" (Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, the Financial Times etc) sure they talk about Bitcoin's lack of "inherent value"...
But have those very same authors EVER made a Bitcoin transaction, have they EVER used Lightning, do they EVER mention Steak n Shake as a technology demonstrator (which is what it is)...
For widespread Lightning adoption and use?
No.
Not once, not ever, not a single time.
One recent article in Bloomberg went to great lengths to lament the loss of transactional capacity of the internet - the internet never developed "micropayments" they say while I literally sit here and USE MICROPAYMENTS on Stacker News from my own node on a phone, an umbrel, a Linux laptop etc...
It is madness.
If I hadn't been to Switzerland, or been to the Netherlands, or to Czech Republic or Steak n Shake I wouldn't believe Bitcoin is what it is because the media basically NEVER talks about it.
Or what they say (in the "mainstream media") is 90% incoherent/wrong/or highly biased.
But in those places Lightning worked for me, I saw with my own 2 eyes, and the economic incentives I believe (for Lightning's adoption) are still overwhelming.
I still believe Lightning will be "mass adopted" one day "transactionally"... to settle enormous amounts of capital and goods.
What's remarkable is Lightning's incredible potential contrasted with... the utter silence about what it is.
These people are "smart"... "They're the experts..." "they're supposed to know..."
And what do they say?
So, there are some things going on right now that I would be worried about. Let me stop you... I wouldn't describe that as the government can't figure it out. Uh, the Biden administration figured out these things are poison. They have no legitimate use. Let's try to discourage people from buying them. And the Trump administration, second Trump administration figured [it] out. I personally can make a billion dollars if I say let them rip. So let them rip. It's not it's not [that] they're baffled by the problem. That both [that] both Biden and Trump were incredibly unbaffled. Biden said they're poison. They have no legitimate use. Try to stop them. Trump said they can make me rich. Let's go for it.
That is not... neither president had any kind of intellectual uncertainty about crypto and what it is. They just they had a big disagreement. That's fair... yeah. So there are some crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum where [there] seems to be some bipartisan consensus of like we see a use for it, maybe we'll allow it to go...
When does the madness end?
The madness is that not of the people but that of the elite. It is a somewhat designed madness, because power is threatened. Your favorite influencer will peddle this madness through the front door of your brain, so that you think you have a problem. FWIW, you do have a problem, it's just not what they're telling you it is.
You wanted to drain the swamp, but you forgot to plan for what should be built in its place and to get some rough consensus on that. But nevertheless the swamp got drained. Say goodbye to the old swamp, hello newer, bigger, and as you'll find, an ultimately more awful swamp. All the alligators are dead but in a few years you'll find the pests and viruses that took the alligators' place are more pesky, and harder to get rid of. And they'll be a problem once they have digested the corpses left behind.
fuck. them. Learn to think for yourself. You're not going to change the world by hoping that other people do your work for you, especially not people with a vested interest against your cause. If you want to change the world, do the work. Do not expect powerful people to be in your corner, and if they say they are, there's a good chance that they are trying to get your sats.
I propose to simply ignore the fiat maxis sometimes, because Brandolini's law applies and we need time to be productive. Bullshit isn't productive.
You wouldn't expect the American media to discuss and amplify a technology that could likely and significantly jeopardize the dollar's hegemony, would you?
On the other hand, we have consistently overlooked a crucial factor that impacts the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, particularly for day-to-day transactions. Bitcoin's adoption by merchants will continue to be slow until we recognize this problem and embrace a solution to it.
Just as Gold cannot be used as money because you can't scrape out a little portion of Gold to weigh and pay, Bitcoin has a temporary economic challenge, which is "its fluctuating Fiat valuation. It is temporary because it is a problem that can be solved and will be solved over time.
You wouldn't see many merchants display "Bitcoin is accepted here" signs because these merchants, unlike Steak n Shake, may not have the large customer base that could ensure that all their Bitcoin sales could be a percentage of their profits, removing the need to constantly liquidate their Bitcoin sales to Fiat.
Literally every business in the world is still Fiat-run, and must balance its books in Fiat, pay suppliers in Fiat, pay employees in Fiat, and stay in business.
Now, accepting Bitcoin for payment is wonderful for large businesses (like Steak n Shake in the US and Pick n Pay in SA) because the percentage of Bitcoin sales they make would likely fall within their daily profit margin. These large businesses can comfortably keep these Bitcoins and still be able to run smoothly. (This is based on the assumption that they actually keep these Bitcoins.) However, smaller businesses in your street may not have this capacity, so they would need to constantly exchange the Bitcoins they collected in sales to Fiat to either re-stock, pay bills, or do other things. This ultimately results in extra fees.
Now, giant POS providers like "Square", which offer Bitcoin payment options to their merchants, currently do not charge fees for exchanging Bitcoin to Fiat, but eventually they would (as they already mentioned), because it is not sustainable.
So, if a merchant requires paying extra fees to liquidate the Bitcoins they accepted as payment to balance their books in fiat and run their businesses, then will they not be better off just accepting Fiat (where they will still pay fees anyway)?
So, the issue that slows Bitcoin's acceptance by merchants is an economic one, and not necessarily unpopularity or technological issues. It is the fact that the world still runs on Fiat, and you can't change that overnight. However, we can find a way to integrate Bitcoin as the base money that the Fiat world runs on, and from there we can easily switch fully to pricing everything in Bitcoin.
Now, how is this possible?
"FIAT CHANNELS" - This is a Lightning implementation that enables the creation of Bitcoin derivatives on the Lightning Network. With this technology, and a hedging mechanism, we can create any Fiat currency IOU's, where Bitcoin is the underlying asset being transferred to and fro. It uses a Host/client mechanism where the Host is any entity running a Lightning node with the Fiat channels plugin, and the client is any wallet client (custodial or non-custodial) that has enabled this technology, e.g., Valet (https://github.com/standardsats/valet)
You don't have to trust us; this protocol is completely open-sourced. Anyone can review it, contribute to it, and tweak it as they like.
GITHUB - https://github.com/standardsats/fiat-channels-rfc CONCEPT - https://standardsats.github.io/
Fiat channels enable merchants to accept Bitcoin payments on Lightning without worrying about volatility. This ensures that they can run their businesses, balance their books, and pay bills without any need to convert from Bitcoin to Fiat, and hence no extra fees.
Interestingly, in Valet (our wallet software) application, where we already have this technology demonstrated, users can at any time exit from Fiat channels back to self-custodial Lightning usage by draining their balances back to their normal Lightning channel. This ensures that merchants can always move their profits to self-custody after balancing the books.
There are other implementations of this idea through differrent approach by other people, such as "The Money socket" by JD (https://socket.money/leatherpaper).
The conclusion is that we need to first integrate Bitcoin as the base money while fronting Fiat as the actual value. With time, when Sats hit parity with even a Cent or the dollar, following a wide understanding of Bitcoin and constant use as base money, then we can easily ditch the dollar and price squarely in Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, the mainstream Bitcoin community has given little attention to this protocol that could completely change the game.
And yes, there's also something of this nature implemented by Galoy, and currently available in the Blink wallet.
This is the future, and the earlier we look at it, the better.
The United States is the financial capital in the world: literally, as the world sources its fiat money from us at a premium. Just as there's "Big Pharma" and "Big Dairy," there's also "Big Money," and we're it.
And just as smaller clinics, organic farms, smaller dairies, etc, all find it harder to operate in the states where "Big Pharma" and "Big Dairy" are at their biggest, the United States is inclined to be hostile to a P2P digital cash system. And I don't just mean "the federal government," but everyone representing or participating in legacy finance here.
It's hardly an insurmountable problem—it is in fact in the process of being surmounted—but there was no reason to expect the "Land of 1929 and 2008" would adopt faster than friggin Lugano. It's Hamilton country.
Americans talk about how 'brave' they are and how 'smart' they are and how independent...
They also talk about wealth inequality, asset inequality, inflation, asset 'availability'... Did they ever stop to think about why we have those things? About why the economy is so K shaped today?
Here's an 'asset'/sound money/transactional capital you can buy today... except noone is using it. It should be obvious
Maybe never as a MoE which is the only way it really succeeds as an alternative to fiat. As a speculative commodity it has already succeeded but in that role it does not replace or even challenge fiats MoE monopoly. Whats needed is more of us to fight for the right to spend sats and that seems a very slow process- maybe it will never happen and Bitcoin will remain as it now largely captured and controlled by the bankers and governments as a harmless KYCed and taxed speculative commodity.
The madness ends when Bitcoin stops being a bet and becomes infrastructure.
When people use it not because they’re excited, scared, or ideologically aligned, but because it’s simply the most reliable way to store and move value.
Until then, volatility, hype and confusion are part of the discovery process.
if you search for "hyperbitcoinization" there are many many good insightful posts about this on Stacker News
I believe lighting payments are stepping stone towards Bitcoin mass adoption.
I agree
Never. We crab below $90k until the financial system collapses, then the government blames bitcoiners and we all die.
I'm not sure whether you're serious or joking
Cuando los mismos desarrolladores no le pongan limites regionales.