There’s your “retirement stack”, you know, the one you DCA and put away into your multi-sig and don’t need to think about until you get old. For that stack, we guess it might be ok to keep thinking in fiat. The jury’s still out on that one. Then there’s the one on your Zeus/Phoenix/Muun wallet; or if you’re hardcore, your own lightning node; which you’re happy to spend. We want to take a few minutes of your time to forget about the first stack and focus only on the second stack for now. If you don't believe in spending bitcoin, for instance you might not earn enough and need to save every single SAT for your future, that's cool too but this post probably won't be interesting for you (sorry it's quite a long one).

There are still way too many interactions with the existing Fiat system. The censorship resistance stops as soon as you want to do normal things like pay your bills because you need to cash out. What we gonna do when the CBDC finally comes? Write angry posts about it on X? The majority of the world's population will not be protesting. They’ll sleepwalk into it just like everything else. That's why even today, despite having nice, simple solutions like Umbrel with a great UX, almost no one goes through the effort of actually using it to store everything on their home server. Instead, they use iCloud, Google Drive etc. Normies (and a lot of plebs) will always choose convenience over self-sovereignty. We don’t blame them, we know it’s hard. You have to really want it to go through the effort. But since normies make up 90% of the world's population, if we truly want to change the world for the better, then we need to do things differently, a bit more radically than today. . . .

So let’s go …

This week, we had a long brainstorming session as we do, once a month and this time an idea came up that we’d like to share with a wider audience in order to hopefully get some constructive feedback. The last time we posted here, we received a ton of awesome feedback from all the stackers and spent the next few months learning and trying out all those amazing suggestions. So we came to the conclusion that Stacker News is the best place to nourish bold ideas.

It's possible that people have thought about this before. In fact, maybe some plebs out there are doing this already. If so, please let us know so that we can have a look and see how it's going. After scouring the interwebs, the closest thing we could find was this post from Samourai Wallet from back in 2018 where they decided to remove all fiat currency conversions from their app. Damn they were EARLY. Kudos to them for that way of thinking. But this is on the wallet side and that’s not what we're discussing here. What we were talking about in our session was on the retail side, where prices are actually set. For digital products, there are several streaming SATs apps like Fountain, where this concept is widely accepted by users. Hell even Stackers right here is a SATs only land. But that gets destroyed as soon as you go over to any kind of product or service, when “pay with Bitcoin” simply means “pay with a fixed fiat price using Bitcoin”.

First of all, the idea we’re presenting is something that can be tried anywhere in the world on any continent, except for countries where bitcoin is banned which is like 5 out of 200. If there’s anyone reading this who runs any type of business, even if it’s a small informal market stall, you’ll understand that nobody dictates to you how to set your pricing. At least not if you’re in a free market economy which is basically everywhere, even in China. Now given that each business is free to decide their prices, then one could say that pricing is set based on a few metrics, such as expense ratios, market demand etc. So the first question is, why is it the majority of bitcoin product businesses still price things in fiat? Could it be because they assume their customers want to see that price in fiat? But their customers are plebs, so what gives? Let's dig further. Why is it that when some dream about the future they say, “one day everything will be priced in btc and it will become the denominator instead of the numerator”. Why one day? When does that “official changeover” happen? Doesn’t it start with a few that take the lead and then the rest will follow?

The most interesting use case would not be a typical bitcoin business like a MicroStrategy or a Trezor, but a normal retail store where people do their day-to-day shopping. On the retail side, one of the most game-changing and impressive implementations for us, was that of Carel van Wyk and Carl Kritzinger from CryptoConvert getting Pick n Pay to implement lightning payments. What's so groundbreaking here is not the ability to pay with bitcoin. It’s the type of store (nationwide) and the number of products they stock, combined with the fact that this was done post-lightning. Overstock was an early adopter way back in 2014, but that was L1 on-chain, not practical for payments and they don't sell groceries. With Pick n Pay, you can literally buy any essential items for your home, including food. This significantly reduces the friction when it comes to living a bitcoin standard. The fact that it’s in Africa is so awesome, since our fiat system is a joke copied from the west (imagine taking something terrible, copying it and making it worse, much like Shiba Inu was a fork of DogeCoin). This means that anyone living close to any of their stores in South Africa can 75% bypass the existing financial system from day 1 of receiving their bitcoin funds. The only friction is to get paid in fiat, pay your rent in fiat, then immediately convert to bitcoin and off you go. It’s hard to stress just how much this moves the needle and hats off to the CryptoConvert team for pulling that off and a shout-out to the Pick n Pay owner/board for willing to be so early and bold to accept such a move, it's super cool. This would be equivalent to Walmart in the US starting to accept Lightning Payments. Of course in El Salvador you can do this everywhere, but the beauty of permissionless is that you can do something like Pick n Pay in nearly any country without having to wait for useless governments around the world to pass new laws.

So, what is it we’re suggesting here? We’re not suggesting Pick n Pay (or MicroStrategy / Trezor) start pricing things in SATs. That’s not low hanging fruit as they’re waaay too large businesses. Also Pick n Pay's backend systems are obviously fiat and none of the SATs they receive are actually kept. What we’re suggesting is that an ordinary pleb starts a small bakery. Why a bakery? Dunno, easy to start and run, fixed costs? It’s mainly ingredients, a physical store and one or two staff. Ok, these do vary a bit, but it’s not going to be enough to make a huge difference. If there is no demand, then you’d have gone out of business anyway, the pricing won’t be a game changer. Of course it doesn’t have to be a bakery. It could also be a food truck, parked outside of Bitcoin Park in Nashville, TN. Those dudes gotta eat right? If you pick that kind of location, you’ll know that the clientele would have no issues seeing prices in SATs and you’d also know that there’s enough of them around to keep you in business for the foreseeable future. Keep it small, keep it simple.

Now to the interesting bit, how to set the pricing? This is why you can’t choose large businesses like a Pick n Pay, because they’re dealing with way too many variables to try such an experiment. Also, they're facing normies. In order to try this out, your customers have to be primarily bitcoiners. The suggested approach would be to pick ONE product out of the entire stock and set a FIXED price. Once that works, you can gradually start doing the same to the rest of the items. We picked bread, because this is something that everyone has to buy, at least once or twice a week. They way we would price it is a loaf of bread at exactly 5000 sats. No point 99 or any of those ridiculous marketing shenanigans, just a pure fixed price. Ok, now you're asking, "but what about the price of bitcoin? It’s up 57% YTD!" Well, it’s also down 62% from the peak a few years back. The point is, it doesn’t matter, we’re talking about a loaf of bread not buying a house. Ok, so second challange, surely over time this won’t work because eventually 5000 sats will be worth quite a bit? We thought about that too. And the solution is - wait for it - reduce the price automatically by 10 SATs on the first day of each month.

What’s going to be happening here is that this price will gradually decline over time and after 30 years of running this business which is the normal time for your average mom and pop shop, the same loaf of bread will cost 1400 sats (5000 - 3600 or 12 months x 30). Did you know that most supermarkets adjust 40% of their products' prices every single week? Nothing to do with inflation, just their normal business practice to manage inventory and maximise profits. This is exhausting for the workers and a terrible experience for poor customers trying to decide where to save money on their groceries. In this case, your regular customers would know exactly what that loaf will cost them every single week throughout the year and for years to come. We call it - Predictable Pricing. More questions remain, "do we need to know how much 5000 sats is worth in fiat?" Yes we do, but only INITIALLY, so only when the price is first set. You see, everything out there is a figment of our imagination. Notice how a lot of SaaS websites have 3 or 4 product tiers and the one in the middle is always “recommended”. It’s playing with people’s minds of what is a “fair” price. Instead, the questions we should be asking are, (1) is this reasonable given the average difficulty adjustment for mining 5000 sats in the last 12 months and (2) would the average pleb have enough SATs at the start of every month to fill up their shopping basket and feed the entire family? In that sense, starting at 5000 and ending at 1400 after 30 years could work, because we have the one equation that the fiat system doesn’t have and that is a predictable supply. One could also add a third equation, (3) is there enough energy around the world for each pleb to mine enough sats to live on? But let’s not go that deep for now, we’ll save that for another post. Btw, we deliberately wrote “for each pleb” and not “for the entire world's population”, because not everyone wants bitcoin and we shouldn’t force them. If there were more businesses like Pick n Pay, it would be perfectly possible for all plebs to live a bitcoin standard IF we were willing to provide a large array of products and services to each other. We have a wide range of skills from construction workers, to chefs, to daycare providers, truck drivers all the way to software engineers. Over time more and more people will be welcomed into the pleb world, but it will never be everyone. It’s entirely possible that less than 50% of the world's population will EVER use bitcoin (on a regular basis), at least in our lifetime. We’re currently at less than 2% so that shows what an uphill battle this will be.

But again, will it matter what the FIAT price of bitcoin will be 30 years from now? It depends on how you earn. Those of you who already earn bitcoin today, would be interesting to hear your thoughts? Do you still think in fiat? Given the example we provided of Pick n Pay above where today (not 5, 10, 15 years in the future), but right now there is already a store where you can choose from over 1000 products and pay with lightning, in person, no exchanges needed. Or even if you still earn in fiat, if you’ve read up to this point, you probably convert 35-75% of your salary to bitcoin immediately upon getting paid, regardless of the price and spend the remaining 25-65% on food, bills, entertainment etc? What if plebs started creating these kinds of stores all over the world, wouldn’t it be great to not have the burden and hassle of keeping the remaining 25-65% in fiat and trying to “time the market”? What do you think? Or whatever your “routine” is, please let us know in the comments as we use this kind of input for research. . . .

To summarise; our belief is that as plebs, we need a clean break from fiat. There will never be a changeover date. This is something that is fully within our control. But you can’t start with houses and cars, due to the impact on both buyer and seller so you start with simple items like lunch (food truck) or pastries. We’ve got a lot of viewpoints, but had to start with some assumptions which could be wrong. So we’re always learning from others in this space.

It’s really hard to get the mind away from conversion, it was super hard for us as well. We’ve all grown up and been brainwashed into thinking in fiat, so unfortunately people think that the value of bitcoin can only be measured in fiat. This is a problem, for the following two reasons (and probably more that you can suggest for us):

These are the notions we want to challenge. Bitcoin only should not just refer to shitcoinery, but to fiat as well. We assume it can only be done when products (and services) start being priced ONLY in satoshis with no conversion. The only question that remains is, what are we waiting for?