Derek Magill

Satoshi’s emails are now at NakamotoStudies.org (Satoshi Nakamoto Institute Cash)

Leave a Comment

For a while now I’ve been a bit troubled by the fact that much of Satoshi’s original writing is most accessible on a site that I think is openly hostile to the original intent of Bitcoin.

I registered the domain NakamotoStudies.org (name subject to change) a few months ago after a reader suggested I make my next project to host all of his writings on a site that can be trusted to put these writings into their proper perspective.

The recent purging of some of Daniel Krawisz’s articles and SNI’s refusal to invite him to their dinner party made very clear to me the importance of having a new place for Bitcoin Cash users to send people who want to read Satoshi Nakamoto’s original writings, so I created it.

At NakamotoStudies.org, I’ve posted all of Satoshi’s main emails and am in the process of hosting other private correspondence from him as well as his forum posts and secondary literature.

You can view the emails here http://nakamotostudies.org/emails/.

If I can find the time to put the work in (open to help and support) I will add commentary, further reading, and cross references to each email to help contextualize them with a broader understanding of Bitcoin and its future in Bitcoin Cash.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

http://nakamotostudies.org/emails/

My Bachelor’s Degree Means Nothing

Leave a Comment

This is an essay from my book Create Your Career (No Degree Required) written by philosopher (outside-academia) Steve Patterson. Steve is the author of What’s the Big Deal About Bitcoin and Square One: The Foundations of Knowledge.

My shiny bachelor’s degree holds a secret: graduating from college isn’t impressive. It’s embarrassingly easy. Not because I’m smart, but because the standards are so low. For the last few semesters of my college life, I mostly wrote bullshit and got straight A’s. And after talking to hundreds of other students and professors, I don’t think my experience was unique. Here’s my story:

I went to Alfred University in Upstate New York. It’s your standard small liberal arts school. My degree was in Political Science. Lest you think this story is unique to Alfred, since graduating, my job has given me the opportunity to speak with tons of other students and professors from around the country, and the vast majority of students have shared similar stories.

The first four semesters, I didn’t really care about my grades. I started college young, and it never really occurred to me that I should try to get A’s. My goal was just to pass classes without working too hard. When Junior year started, I had a girlfriend at the time who was a dedicated student and was getting all A’s. That seemed like a good idea, so I too committed myself to getting A’s in every class.

At the time, I thought I was entering a new realm, filled with academic elite. I expected intellectual camaraderie with students and rigorous debates with professors. Ideas would be passionately challenged and defended. It was a romantic vision. And it was horribly wrong.

Instead, I found a realm of lazy students and disinterested professors. My peers were far more interested in partying than ideas, and their vision of academic success was to allot maximum time to socializing while still passing class. They accomplished this by mastering the fine art of academic regurgitation.

What is academic regurgitation, you ask? Simple: write what the professor wants to hear and how he wants to hear it. You don’t have to ideologically agree with the professor; rather, there’s a standard format for communicating that you’ve done the homework and read the assignments. It doesn’t matter if you understand the material, nor does it take much intellectual effort. Of course, communicating you’ve done the homework is quite different from actually doing the homework.

It wasn’t long before I, too, became a master regurgitant. With few exceptions, there was no reason to put serious effort into academic work if you were already getting high marks. The vast majority of students, who didn’t even bother regurgitating, did no assigned work at all, so we usually ended up going over old material every day. This punished any student who actually did the assignments beforehand. So rather than sit through a lecture repeating everything we were supposed to read, I’d usually skim over the assignments before class, picking out the key ideas which I thought would come up. That way, I could raise my hand and answer questions and act like I did the homework thoroughly. I practiced this skill often, so eventually I could parse through several dozen pages in a matter of minutes. If that sounds impressive, it’s only because I understood it as more of a science than an art.

The stimulating conversations I had hoped for never materialized. The intellectual challenge and debate between my peers was non-existent. I knew the quality of my work, my effort, declined, but my grades didn’t show it. I even got in trouble with the Alfred administration – later completely exonerated – which is a ridiculous story for another time. My romantic vision of academia died, and it only took about a semester.

I spent a semester in Washington DC at American University, and I remember taking this Russian History class. The teacher couldn’t resist incorporating Michel Foucault into her classes. I can still hear her Brooklyn accent talk about “power structures” – or as she put it, “powah structyahs”. So, what’s an A-seeking student do when asked to write every week about Russian history? Channel Foucault and incorporate vague, abstract connections into your writing. She ate it up. It was a running joke to see how much nonsense and fluff I could get away with and still receive full credit. I got an A in that class, and what did I learn? Couldn’t tell you. Something about Russian culture being ambivalent towards authoritarianism.

Or how about the class on meditation and relaxation. The professors didn’t want to stress anyone out over their grades (because that would be too ironic), so they ended up giving everybody an A. It didn’t really matter if you showed up, though I did, because you were practically guaranteed of getting an A from the start. Students were permitted to fall asleep in class – they were certainly relaxed while unconscious.

Or what about my English class, “Fiction into Film”. Liberal arts education insists you get a wide range of different classes, and it was the same story in each: lazy, uninterested students being taught by dispassionate professors. In that class, we’d read a book, then watch the corresponding film adaptation. Then, naturally as college students, we’d write. Our assignments usually required us to create abstract interpretations of the material. Students were eager to write about the sexual overtones in everything. Any whimsical interpretation went unchallenged, because after all, literary interpretation is subjective. If a student feels like Snow White is about sado-masochism, who’s the professor to disagree? There was no critical thinking, nothing but regurgitating the plot so the professor knew we read the book, then writing some fluffy nonsense about grandiose interpretations and personal feelings. And that exercise was supposed to strengthen my college education. As if creating wild meta-narratives and writing down my feelings were an employable skill. Of course, I enjoyed reading many of those books – they were really good. But I don’t need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a university for good book recommendations.

And if I didn’t need a university to recommend books, I certainly didn’t need them to teach me all the deep insights from mandatory PE classes. I spend thousands of dollars learning the rules of golf, then smacking some golf balls into a field three times a week. Not only did it cost thousands, but I got academic credit for it. As in, that work counted towards getting my illustrious bachelor’s degree.

Though it might sound silly, it was discouraging to get good grades with the amount of work I put into college. It just seemed wrong. It only makes sense in one scenario: I must have been graded in relation to my peers. With only a handful of exceptions, every student was uninterested in learning; they were focused on socializing and partying. And Alfred has no reputation of being a party school – quite the opposite. While I was a lazy student, compared to my peers, I was bookworm. No class contained more than a fraction of interested students, and professors had to teach to the middle. And the middle, by any absolute metric, was scraping the bottom. My fellow students put a tiny amount of work into their educations, and yet many of them received respectable grades.

I remember being perplexed by professors telling me I was a good writer. Then, I read some of my peers’ writing. It was abysmal. Horrible. Terrible. Shockingly bad, not just grammatically, but in terms of coherence. Conceptual world-salad was the norm, interspersed with big words. So by contrast, I understood why professors would look at my mediocre writing as excellent.

Of course, being in the Political Science department, our classes weren’t graced by large numbers of athletes. Any class heavily populated by school athletes was in an even sorrier situation. Alfred had reasonably good sports teams for being such a small school, and you could tell the administration wanted to keep them around. You could also tell their expertise was running into each other at high velocity. Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with sports, at all. But, when an institution of “higher learning” conflates athletic merit with intellectual merit, there’s a problem. I knew students who graduated without being able to write or think past a middle-school level. They masqueraded as educated students, because they were wonderfully capable athletes, which made the administration money.

With such illustrious peers, group projects were a catch-22. Either I’d have to do everybody else’s work to get a good grade, or I’d trust my peers to do their job and get a bad grade, because they were all-but-guaranteed to half-ass their work.

Now, I must give credit where credit’s due. I had probably three good classes in which I learned a lot and felt the classes were positive. One was a class in Logic, the other two were about political theory. But three classes over the span of four years isn’t exactly worth the time or money. By far, the most valuable experience I had in college was meeting my wife. We met in my last semester, and I’d endure another hundred years in school if I knew I’d end up marrying such a wonderful person.

None of this has mentioned the actual quality of what was taught. It would be impossible to quantify the amount of nonsense and error I was taught over those four years. The content was biased and wrong. For example, any time we talking about economics in our classes, nobody – not even the professor – had a clue what they were talking about. I don’t say this out of hubris. The one Economics professor on campus did not have an understanding of basic economic principles, and he has a Ph.D. I can’t entirely blame the students, given their professors lack of understanding. In the future, I will write in more detail on this site about the many inaccuracies taught to impressionable undergrad students.

I was often “that guy” in class, frequently raising my hand to challenge and correct my professors and peers. So needless to say, I wasn’t exactly the class darling. Students had no trouble dismissing my arguments by virtue of the fact that I disagreed with the professor. They were used to treating their statements of opinion as reasoned argument. Rarely did students have open-minded debate with each other – they were busy nodding in agreement about how smart they were and how much they agreed with the professor.

So, in short, I must confess to all of my future employers and readers: my college education was a joke. My degree means little more than I am patient enough to find a way to live through four years of educational farce. The really perverted thing is that my degree has likely helped me land a job. Liberal arts education might be worthless in terms of the accuracy or use-value of the curriculum, but unfortunately it still means something to future employers. I just hope they don’t read this post.

Create Your Career is currently in final edits and will be available for purchase on Amazon and Yours.org later this week.

Putting the finishing touches on Create Your Career

3 Comments

It’s been almost a year since I first thought of doing this book while on a trip in Breckinridge, Colorado. Unforeseen roadblocks, work and some procrastination has made finishing it take longer than I’d hoped, but I’m tremendously excited to announce that it will be published next week!

If you don’t know already, Create Your Career is the book I wish I’d had when I dropped out of college and started working. It’s a compilation of essays covering self directed education, strategies for success, and how to create an incredible career on your own terms, and the material has been tested from people all around the world, from Bosnia to Boston to Brazil. Whether you’re in college, you’ve recently graduated, or you’re a professional, this book will have something for you.

I’m finishing up the final touches today then passing them to my editor. Here’s a screenshot of some edits from Isaac, who as always has been tremendous help in this project.

One of the things that made this project take longer than I thought is the surprising number of things that need to be done to actually finish a book. Font, paper type, size, matte cover or glossy, pricing and profit margin…You get your cover done then you realize that you need to design the book spine as well. Then you realize it doesn’t fit the formatting requirements and it needs to be reworked. You second guess your writing because you’ve read it so many times it starts to sound amateur and you wish you’d done it differently but you realize that you’ll never get it done if you change things constantly.

This has been an incredible learning experience and I’m already very excited for my next book, which I’m sure will go more smoothly and which I hope to have out within a few months. Here’s another screenshot of an edit (and an endorsement):

Truly better than any career book I’ve seen. Not bad!

Over the coming days before it launches on Amazon and Yours.org, I will release a chapter or two as well as some more inside looks at the writing process behind the book (and anything else I think will be neat for promotion).

Thank you all who have made writing so fun these last few years. You’ve helped make this book fun to put together.

How often do you write by hand?

1 Comment

Friedrich Nietzche bought a typewriter in 1882 because his vision has been failing him and he feared he would have to give up writing entirely if he had to write by hand. The typewriter saved him. Once he had mastered typing, he was able to write while his eyes were closed, sparing himself from the headaches he experienced while focusing his eyes on the page during hand writing.

If our date is correct, we owe to this typewriter most of Nietzsche’s later works including Also Sprach Zarathustra and Zur Genealogies Der Moral. Interestingly though, the typewriter may have had some unintended effects on his writing.

From Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows:

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Though I certainly don’t think we can entirely draw conclusions from this alone, personal experience suggests to me that I write quite differently, and that I enjoy writing more, by hand instead of computer. Like Nietzsche, and I don’t mean that in the sense that we’re on the same level, I’ve found that the medium affects my message.

Writing an outline or part of an essay by hand first produces much better writing for me than does writing in a WordPress text editor. I focus better with a pen and paper, I take bigger risks with my writing, and the style and content flow more naturally.

And more and more I’ve found myself carrying a Moleskine and a Pilot G2 everywhere and using them to draft by hand all the essays I publish later online.

The staggering lies and scams of Bitcoin Core

22 Comments

I debated between this image from Equilibrium and a tacky used car salesman.

Last night one of the leading BTC “economists” decided to weigh in on a Twitter discussion about Bitcoin Cash. Predictably he left a rather unlettered jumble of keyboard vomit that reminds me of a 5 year old shouting “bcash! scam!” again and again and was illustrative of the intellectual rigor in the Core camp these days.

I’ll say categorically that the “scam” claim from Bitcoin Core trolls is as bankrupt as fiat money and is much ado about nothing. There is no great scam at all, only a large and growing community of people who forked away because they grew tired of BTC being deliberately crippled by the morons and charlatans who took control of it.

I’ve addressed many of their ridiculous arguments elsewhere but since they keep at it, I thought I could use this essay to outline some of their own lies and scams. I think the record of history and all the current evidence suggests that the only real scams in the Bitcoin space are coming from them, not Bitcoin Cash supporters and users.

So what are the scams of Bitcoin Core? Here’s a running list…

1) They spread lies and slander about Bitcoin Cash supporters, the most common of which are the totally debunked claims that Roger Ver is some kind of explosives dealing terrorist who stockpiled weapons grade bombs in an apartment complex. They use “known” as an Orwellian prefix to the slander but never provide proof of their claims since no proof exists. For more examples, see Lies About Roger Ver.

2) They openly call for their opponents to be thrown in jail and threaten to use state power to squash anyone who has a position contrary to theirs. Examples include the threats of lawsuits against Coinbase for allegedly violating SEC regulations (not try and who the hell cares?) and the bogus puffed up threats against Bitcoin.com. [1]

3) They conjure up imaginary victims of Bitcoin Cash as part of their propaganda campaign and claim “thousands of people” are losing money because of sites like Bitcoin.com. When they fail to raise any money for their lawsuits because the victims don’t exist, they never recant or apologize.

4) They straw man Bitcoin Cash supporters with claims of “Crypto-Keynesianism,” creating the false impression that support for large blocks comes from some desire to artificially increase transaction volume as an economic stimulant. As I’ve pointed out, supporting rational throughput capacity increases is not the same thing as arguing for actual throughput.

5) The co-owner of Bitcoin.org (among others) has repeatedly called to rewrite the white paper and other key Bitcoin related documents so that they are no longer credible points of discussion in the BTC/BCH debates. He then lied about ever calling for that.

6) Bitcoin.org claimed BTC had “fast transactions” and “low fees” for months and months, long after BTCs fees had inflated and transactions could take hours. They continued marketing a version of BTC that no longer existed.

7) r/Bitcoin rewrote comments, deleted comments, banned users, and censored threads for years while pretending r/Bitcoin was an open and free forum as an effort to manufacture social consensus. Users were left to believe that everyone agreed that small blocks were best, but as Mike Hearn has pointed out, this was not the case.

8) They use armies of bots or paid agitators to create confusion and distraction in discussion threads on Twitter. I can’t tell you how many “arguments” I’ve been in with new Twitter accounts with no followers and no Tweets besides hundreds of variants of “bcash btrash” to every recent thread that can be found.

9) They claimed fees would not go as high as they did and that big blockers were wacky fear mongerers whose positions had no grounding in reality. When fees skyrocketed they redefined the word “spam” to mean “any transaction they don’t like” and spread vicious, unproven lies that BCH users had massive reserves of cash to burn to clog the BTC mempool. They later changed tunes and claimed high fees were the plan all along.

10) They pretended to support a block increase until they got Segwit then backed out of the block increase and pretended it never happened.

11) As Gavin Andresen pointed out, their own website supported a block increase, now they pretend hard forks are the tools of scammers and that this part of history never happened.

12) They removed Gavin Andresen’s commit access on the false grounds that he was hacked and never restored it after the fact.

13) They mass report Twitter accounts to trick the ban algorithm and silence people for breaking no Twitter terms at all. Like their censorship of Reddit forums, it creates false impressions about the varying opinions in the Bitcoin Twittersphere.

14) They organize fake review campaigns of pro-BCH services like the Bitcoin.com wallet to give the impression that its some buggy junky app you need to stay away from lest it steals your coins.

15) They lie about the technicals of the block size increase even after it has been proven that a 2mb, an 8mb, and a 32mb block size won’t affect the ability to run full-nodes.

16) They pretend to be defenders of the “noobs” but see no problems in the “store of value” propaganda they spread that Bitcoin would never drop below 20k again and December was the last time to buy. When people lost staggering amounts of money, they didn’t back down their statements. Everyone was “stupid.” This is a charity they never extend to BCHers.

17) They create pro-BCH accounts on Twitter and Reddit and use those accounts to spread claims such as “thousands of BCH users support a name change to BitCash.”

18) They knowingly misrepresent Bitcoin as some kind of “brand” to smear Bitcoin Cash as a brand hijacker even though they have for years called Bitcoin a “permissionless” project.

19) They have said that Lightning Network was 18 months away for years now and overpromised and underdelivered time and again. Any organization that did this would be accused of false advertising and bait and switch.

20) Like the Church that tried to prevent texts from being translated into the vernacular because “the layperson could not interpret them,” they set up a cult of developers who you were not allowed to question. As Mike Hearn wrote:

The main reason cited by the Core supporter for why he was opposed to Bitcoin XT was that “the Core developers have PhDs and neither Mike nor Gavin do”. 

This exchange sums up the mentality many had at the time: Bitcoin is complex, therefore it can only be understood by experts, therefore I should obey the instructions of experts even if they may superficially appear to be nonsense. 

This effectively stifled what remaining legitimate discussion was left after years of censorship.

21) They launched a social media engineering campaign to pretend that BCH was “Bcash” in order to strip BCH of it’s Bitcoin name. This was a deliberate and coordinated attempt by Core supporters to create a false narrative about BCH and label it as another alt-coin.

Indeed the Core camp is in a bad state right now. They are losing market dominance and trust as their scams catch up to them. The “economist” who commented on the discussion last night told me that “we deserve all the pain that is coming our way” and I cannot help but read this as projection and a cry for help.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Like this essay? You can support my Bitcoin Cash writing here. Address: qrqzs8ehma0lnk0l837pfvwyspkq6f3l3uelcsvga8

[1] I can’t provide links to hundreds of Tweets. Just search “Bitcoin Cash jail,” “Coinbase jail” or “Roger Ver jail” on Twitter.

bCommerce: Bitcoin Cash Merchant Growth Challenges and Fixes

1 Comment

Image by Satoshi Doodles

The popularity of my guide to accepting Bitcoin Cash payments for your online store has made it even more clear to me just how much people want the bCommerce industry to grow.

I thought in this essay I could discuss some of the “growth challenges” that I see in the industry now along with some proposals for potential fixes that can be undertaken by individuals interested in participating in spreading bCommerce adoption and (potentially) making some money in the process.

This is not exhaustive or definitive any any sense — I might over-exaggerate some challenges and underestimate others — but here are the problems as I see them now. If you have any to add to this list or have reasons for why one is not actually and issue, let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

The reputation of the obsolesced BTC chain

Roger Ver has pointed out, and I agree with him, that the BTC chain has delayed the adoption of Bitcoin by a number of years. 2017 was the first time we saw large numbers of businesses actually dropping Bitcoin as a payment option because it had become to unreliable and unprofitable. I don’t think it can be overstated just how much damage this did and I suspect it will be an uphill battle to win back the trust in these businesses that previously took years to earn.

I think we have reason to be optimistic though if the rapid rebuilding of wallets and infrastructure that the Bitcoin Cash industry has already accomplished are any indicator of future success, but it’s still important to be aware of this. People do not trust Bitcoin anymore. That will need to be changed.

Services like CoinText, Yours.org, BlockPress and the Bitcoin.com faucet are all helping tremendously with this by allowing people to get their first experience transacting with Bitcoin Cash. Businesses need opportunities to see that Bitcoin is reliable in commerce once again with Bitcoin Cash.

One easy win to fight against this is a series of short videos interviewing business owners and Bitcoin Cash users about their experiences in bCommerce. A “bCommerce Success Stories” page on a website is one way to showcase this. Shopify provides us with an interesting template to off which this can be based:

This could also be done in podcast form, interviewing business owners who take Bitcoin Cash as a payment method and asking them about how they grew their BCH customer base, what tools they use, and what their general experience has been using BCH in comparison to traditional credit cards and fiat.

Education and toxic Core culture

As Mike Hearn has pointed it, it was the Core community that killed the technology, and it’s that same community that has warped the reputation of Bitcoin in the eyes of the public. As they themselves say, it’s not really for commerce at all. It’s not for small purchases. “Just use fiat,” they’ve said for years.

It is difficult to win businesses acceptance as a payment method when the culture at large does not see Bitcoin as a payment method at all, but as some sort of stock or get-rich-quick scheme. In my conversations with business owners I know this to be true. The word “peer-to-peer digital cash” is hardly ever mentioned. They see Bitcoin as an investment vehicle at best.

People will need to be reeducated. Bitcoin is cash.

I think there’s a good deal of room for a site like bCommerceU.com which would be dedicated to rebuilding the reputation of Bitcoin as a digital cash system and to providing education and resources to business owners, small and large, to learn about Bitcoin Cash and how it can help grow their business. Shopify’s blog and resources and Startup School both provide interesting examples for a project like this to learn from:

CoinGeek’s bCommerce Conference and Jimmy Nyugen’s talks are great starts too and I think a lot of their message can be reproduced at a local level by average BCH users in business seminars, meetups, etc. People need to learn again that Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cash system that is better for commerce than any government-backed money.

And if you can’t do it locally, a digital bCommerce Summit that is free to attend and brings in digital presenters and online store owners from around the world could be huge. Self Publishing School offers a solid, albeit cheesy, example of this:

Picture 30-40 bCommerce experts presenting digitally to thousands of businesses around the world about how they can use Bitcoin Cash.

There’s also a ton of money to be made by a handful of freelancers who want to go out and sell businesses on paying them to set up payment solutions on their sites. Travel By Bit appears to be doing well this for the old BTC chain. Don’t wait for businesses to come to you. Make the pitch, show them why it’s valuable as digital cash, and get them set up for a small fee that makes it worth your time.

Marketing and Discovery

As I see it, the problem of marketing and discovery comes in two forms:

a) Businesses that are new to cryptocurrency don’t understand how to properly market their acceptance to the community. 

Many of them I’ve seen don’t even have it listed on their site anywhere and will set up payments and lose interest in Bitcoin Cash when they get no new orders. I’ve provided some steps that you can use to help business market themselves to the Bitcoin Cash world in my payments guide that were successful for Undertech Undercover, but that’s just a start. There will be a growing opportunity for people to create solutions that connect businesses that accept Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin Cash users to help make it profitable.

I’ve love to see something like an AppSumo daily deals site for companies that accept Bitcoin Cash to offer discounted products to the community. I’ve found hundreds of interesting products through AppSumo and they’ve done wonders for upstart businesses in connecting them to a new customer base they could not have found on their own.

A Product Hunt for businesses that adopt Bitcoin Cash is another idea that interests me:

There are other potential projects that come to mind but as a general rule, don’t expect businesses to get orders in Bitcoin Cash simply because they add a payment solution. They need all the help they can get with promotion.

b) Businesses already in cryptocurrency tend to be bad at marketing in general both within and outside of the community.

It’s laughably bad. I have yet to visit a business in the industry that doesn’t have glaringly obvious marketing wins they aren’t taking. The simple solution here is that there need to be more marketers and salespeople at these businesses who can bring best practices from successful companies outside of Bitcoin Cash into the Bitcoin Cash space.

Don’t fall into the lie that the only people who matter in cryptocurrency are the developers. If you look at any startup, the number one role they’re hiring for are salespeople and customer service reps. They matter. Step up and create some opportunity for yourself because it’s everywhere right now and early actors will make a killing.

User Experience

Bitcoin Cash is miles ahead of BTC and Lightning Network in terms of usability, but it’s still clunky or limited in certain ways compared to traditional payment mechanisms. Jimmy Nyugen answers this best so I encourage you to watch the section in the video below from his talk “A bComm World:”

I’m frankly not too concerned about this. We’ve seen the disastrous consequences created by bad user experiences and won’t make this mistake again.

Lack of incentive

Many of the companies I’ve spoken with that accept Bitcoin Cash payments do so out of ideology. That’s great for your early adopters but building an entire industry will require more than that. bCommerce needs to be a fundamentally profitable decision for companies to have the incentive to participate in it.

I’ve already written about some solutions to this above. Services that can do a great job connecting Bitcoin Cash users to companies and products can make a killing and help businesses profit in return by accepting BCH. Eventually we will reach a point in time where it’s just a “must” to accept Bitcoin Cash as a payment method much like it’s a “must” to have Visa or MasterCard. But we aren’t there yet. For the average online business now, Bitcoin Cash will only account for a small percentage of online sales. Anything that can be done to increase that percentage will help increase adoption on the whole.

Moving forward

I enjoy battling with Core as much as the next person and I’ll continue to do it here on this blog and on Twitter, but I think a good motto to follow is “criticize by creating.” You want a bCommerce world? Go build it.

Like this essay? You can support my Bitcoin Cash writing here.

I’ll be at the CoinGeek.com Conference in Hong Kong

1 Comment

I’m excited to say that thanks to Calvin Ayre and his team at CoinGeek.com, I’ll be at the CoinGeek 2018 Conference in Hong Kong later this month! I had a great time at Satoshi’s Vision in Tokyo earlier this year but I’m looking forward to CoinGeek even more because of my background in eCommerce.

Here’s the description from the conference page:

At the inaugural CoinGeek Conference, you’ll see history being made, as merchants, investors and visionaries come together to explain how Bitcoin Cash enables the next generation of e-commerce websites.

Bitcoin Cash has the advantages of crypto-currency, but with a wider user base, cheaper transactions and faster settlements. Make sure that your e-commerce business is ready for the future.

If you’re planning to attend and want to connect in Hong Kong, send me an email or Tweet. If you can’t attend, don’t worry, I’m planning to share my notes, photos, and thoughts, from the conference live on Twitter throughout the course of the conference. I’ll make sure to get you everything you need to know.

bCommerce: A Guide to Accepting Bitcoin Cash Payments for Your Online Store

7 Comments

If you like this project, please consider supporting it and I’ll turn it into a beautiful PDF and Amazon book.

This is a short and basic guide I’ve written up on why and how to accept Bitcoin Cash payments for your eCommerce store. The document will be edited and revised, and I hope to turn it into a beautiful PDF and Amazon book sometime soon.

Consider it a rough draft with all the content you need to start accepting Bitcoin Cash payments for your online store today.

[Updated May 6, 2018]

Who Am I and Why this Guide?

I’m not a tech ninja or cryptocurrency guru, but I’ve been involved with Bitcoin in some capacity since late 2012. I’ve also been helping ecommerce businesses grow theirs customer bases and develop their technology stacks for the last four years or so.

I’ve noticed that there are thousands of businesses out there that could benefit from accepting Bitcoin Cash as a payment option for their online store but they don’t do it because they’re skeptical of the technology or they don’t know how to get started.

Having worked with dozens of businesses to help them get started, I wanted a place to put the basic lessons down so that regular business owners could use it as a starting point to accept Bitcoin Cash.

That’s where this short guide comes in. If you’re a business owner or a store manager who has even the slightest interest in cryptocurrency, this is for you.

I want to give you a brief understanding of why you should integrate Bitcoin Cash payments for your business and some of the easiest ways to do it. I’ll also give you some tips about how to market your company to the Bitcoin Cash community so that you can start seeing the money come in.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be ready to start accepting payments this week and participating in what many like to call the bCommerce revolution. If you’re not technical, don’t worry because there’s no coding involved at all. It’s easy and risk free. And best of all, it can be profitable. One store, Undertech Undercover, did over $1000 in orders during its first few weeks, and that’s just the beginning.

I hope you enjoy this guide. If you have any questions, please Tweet me @derekmagill.

If you like this project, please consider supporting it. If I raise enough money (approx. $1000-$2000), I will hire a team to create a beautiful PDF and physical book version of this that can be distributed to businesses around the world.

qrqzs8ehma0lnk0l837pfvwyspkq6f3l3uelcsvga8

qrqzs8ehma0lnk0l837pfvwyspkq6f3l3uelcsvga8

A quick note on terms

I use the terms Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Core, BCH and BTC in this guide. For our purposes, we’re talking primarily about Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash, which is commonly abbreviated as BCH. BTC, or Bitcoin Core, is an obsolesced version of Bitcoin that is no longer useful for commerce.

Let’s get started!

Why should I accept Bitcoin Cash?

Why should you accept Bitcoin Cash at your online store? I could say that it’s because Bitcoin Cash helps the poor. I could say it’s because it will make the world more free. I could go on about the importance of sound money that is out of the grips of government bureaucrats. I could say you’ll be doing everyone a social service or that Bitcoin Cash is the future. It is probably all true.

But I don’t think any of that should factor into your business decisions. The simple fact is that accepting Bitcoin Cash will help you grow your business by providing a better payment option to customers and helping you reach a bigger audience.

It has a number of benefits that make it better than cash or credit cards that include a) BCH is chargeback-proof; b) there are zero to low transaction fees associated with Bitcoin Cash; and c) accepting BCH makes business more attractive to certain types of customers among others.

No chargebacks or fraud

Unlike credit card transactions, Bitcoin Cash transactions cannot be reversed. Once funds are sent the payments are final unless the merchant consents to a refund. As someone who has worked with 25 million dollar + revenue ecommerce companies, I know how much money and time is wasted on fraudulent credit card charges every year. Companies I worked with often experience this scenario:

The merchant sells a $100 item through a credit card transaction. They ship the product out and the tracking code says it arrived. Months later they hear from the credit card company that the customer never received the product or that the charge was the result of fraud. Now the merchant has to refund the charges and cover the cost of the item and shipping costs.

At scale this can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Bitcoin Cash eliminates this so that you can focus on making sales and growing your company.

Almost 0% transaction fees

Since Bitcoin Cash is decentralized and the network operates without middlemen, fees are almost non-existent. At the time of this writing, the median transaction fee is 0.0061 USD. What would you do with an extra 3%?

I’ve shown dozens of business owners transactions on Bitcoin Cash and low fees are always one of the top selling points. I was recently at a bar in Tokyo and when we showed the owner how to accept Bitcoin Cash he immediately set it up and started accepting it on the spot. This has been my experience with most businessmen I meet.

One business owner who runs a 25 million dollar + company estimated the value he might save on fees and chargebacks if he were able to exclusively accept Bitcoin Cash in the millions of dollars per year.

Even better, Bitcoin Cash will enable you to accept micropayments on your site. If you want to sell a digital product for a few cents, for example, you can do it! I regularly transact online with Bitcoin Cash for about 1/3 of 1 cent through BlockPress, a Bitcoin Cash based social network similar to Twitter.

Better user experience

Anyone who has experienced the process of checking out with Bitcoin Cash knows how easy it can be. Unlike traditional purchasing, there’s no need to find your credit card and enter all that information correctly. Just enter your name, shipping info and pay! One or two less steps at checkout means less abandoned carts and more revenue. More importantly, it provides your customers with a safer experience on site since they don’t need to worry about credit card theft.

Value Appreciation

Holding fiat money typically means you’re losing between 1% and 3% a year due to inflation. Bitcoin Cash has been on an appreciation trend since its launch. In the past few weeks along at the time of this writing it is up in value over 100%. I’ve personally seen companies accept a Bitcoin Cash payment and see it appreciate by 10% or more before they convert it to fiat. That’s extra money in your pockets if you hold your Bitcoin Cash.

More Customers and International Reach

Accepting Bitcoin Cash enables merchants to widen their customer base. A growing number of consumers are starting to use BCH to purchase goods and services. Accepting the digital currency could be just the thing to set you apart and get them to choose you.

Not only that, but BCH can be used by anyone in the world who has a cell phone. That means if they don’t have access to credit cards or banks, or they don’t have a good computer internet connection, these customers can still order from you.

Why should I not accept Bitcoin Cash?

We’ve talked about the good reasons to accept Bitcoin Cash, but what are some of the commonly discussed problems with it?

Volatility

Bitcoin Cash is market driven and since it is new, its value can swing a good deal. This is great when the price is going up, but it can be challenging if the price goes too low. You might accept it one day and lose 10% on it the next.

One of the solutions we’ll discuss in the guide, BitPay, allows you to convert your Bitcoin Cash payments into US dollars at the spot value of the sale so that you’re protected from the volatility. You get the benefits of accepting Bitcoin Cash without the downside.

While nobody but you knows your business and your risk tolerance, my general belief is that businesses that accept Bitcoin Cash should hold at least some of their earnings in Bitcoin Cash. The price is going up on the whole and it could be a wonderful long term investment in your business.

Internet Trolls

There are a loud but dwindling number of people in the cryptocurrency ecosystem who have made it their mission to loudly signal against Bitcoin Cash. It is not uncommon for businesses to receive angry online messages from these people and it can be scary as a new business if you aren’t expecting it.

Rest assured, these trolls go away quickly and the noise they make has no real power to disrupt your business.

Isn’t cryptocurrency used for drugs?

While it’s true there are illicit markets that accept Bitcoin Cash and other cryptocurrencies, that is also true with any modern currency today. The fact is that Bitcoin Cash is used daily on Shopify stores around the world, at places like Newegg, to donate to non-profits like The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mises Institute, The Internet Archive, as well as helping people get basic necessities in countries experiencing monetary collapse like Venezuela.

Here’s a quote from a Twitter user in the Phillipines about how he’s using Bitcoin Cash:

“I love it because it’s actually being used to good effect as a currency, especially in the Philippines to donate food and supplies which is near and dear to my heart and family. These coins are only as good as what we do with them.” – @SOTMead

Here’s a business owner:

“Both of my companies will be accepting BCH as a form of payment. One is starting immediately…” – @danwag06

Just like we don’t blame the US dollar when a criminal uses it, we shouldn’t blame Bitcoin Cash or any other cryptocurrency. And given all the benefits of Bitcoin Cash, its potential for good (and for growing your business) far outweighs the cons of a few bad actors.

Why BCH instead of BTC?

Without going too deep into the history of Bitcoin Cash, it’s important to understand that on August 1st, 2017, Bitcoin effectively split into two separate versions if Bitcoin. BTC, or Bitcoin Core, and BCH, or Bitcoin Cash. The split happened after years and years of debates over how to scale Bitcoin properly. One side believed Bitcoin should be more like a banking settlement layer or digital gold with high fees and slow transaction times. The other side believed Bitcoin should be decentralized digital cash that was fast and easy to use for all daily commerce.

BTC became increasingly slow and unreliable while BCH maintained its low fees and fast times making it effective for bCommerce. While businesses like Steam Gaming have dropped Bitcoin, tens of thousands of new companies have started to accept Bitcoin Cash. If your goal is paying customers, use Bitcoin Cash.

You can see a (12/15/2017) comparison of average Bitcoin Cash miner fees vs. average Bitcoin Core miner fees below.

While Bitcoin Core fees have dropped significantly since then because less users are transacting with it, it is still too high to be reliable in commerce and fees can spike periodically, further harming your ability to accept Bitcoin Core payments.

Here’s a blog post put out by Steam in December about why they decided to stop accepting BTC as a payment option:

As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.

In the past few months we’ve seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.

Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days. This creates a problem for customers trying to purchase games with Bitcoin. When checking out on Steam, a customer will transfer x amount of Bitcoin for the cost of the game, plus y amount of Bitcoin to cover the transaction fee charged by the Bitcoin network. The value of Bitcoin is only guaranteed for a certain period of time so if the transaction doesn’t complete within that window of time, then the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.

The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the Bitcoin network transaction fee again. This year, we’ve seen increasing number of customers get into this state. With the transaction fee being so high right now, it is not feasible to refund or ask the customer to transfer the missing balance (which itself runs the risk of underpayment again, depending on how much the value of Bitcoin changes while the Bitcoin network processes the additional transfer).

At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option. We may re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date.

We will continue working to resolve any pending issues for customers who are impacted by existing underpayments or transaction fees.

— The Steam Team

Unfortunately it appears that the BTC developers and community have no real intention of fixing this any time soon. Bitcoin Cash exists in part for that reason and it’s why you should accept Bitcoin Cash as your primary cryptocurrency payment method. If you’d like to accept BTC, you can do that as well but be prepared for less reliability and higher fees associated with payments, assuming you get any customers at all.

As a related point, the Bitcoin Cash community is dedicated to using their Bitcoin Cash to spread adoption. They spend their Bitcoin Cash regularly and will be excited to use it at your store in a way no other cryptocurrency community is.

Here are some quotes from them on the subject of BTC and BCH:

Bitcoin’s payment system functionality was deprecated in 2014 and removed completely on November 8, 2017. Any businesses that need payment system functionality should upgrade to Bitcoin Cash immediately. – @ryanxcharles

Bitcoin Core’s transaction fees have made purchasing at our ATMs economically unfeasibly again. We will be resuming sales when/if the meme pool backlog is cleared. Bitcoin Cash purchases are unaffected and working smoothly. Dash also available. – @confuciusatl

BCH is designed to be useable by as many people as possible, regardless of how much money they earn, what country they live in, or how accessible the internet is for them. – @hardforkoftruth

You’ve got a built in customer base with Bitcoin Cash.

Accepting Payments

Still interested in accepting Bitcoin Cash payments? Great! The first step is for you to briefly acquaint yourself with how Bitcoin Cash transactions work. This is not, strictly speaking, a mandatory step, but I highly recommend it.

Download a wallet from Bitcoin.com to your iPhone or Android and get some free Bitcoin Cash at free.bitcoin.com. All the instructions are provided on the site and you can experience in seconds your very first Bitcoin Cash transaction. Back up your wallet following the instructions inside the application and review the security and storage recommendations provided at Bitcoin.com.

Once you’re comfortable, you’re ready to start accepting payments on your site.

Payment Processors

If you already have an existing eCommerce site, you can quickly get started with Bitcoin Cash by integrating your store with a Bitcoin Cash payment processor. Many ecommerce platforms (Shopify, for example) already have existing integrations, which makes setting up Bitcoin Cash payments pain free for people with even the most basic technical knowledge.

I personally recommend BitPay or Coinbase Commerce, but Rocketr, Coinpayments, and Coinify can work well too. Here’s a video on setting up BitPay. It was made originally for Bitcoin Core but it will work perfectly well for Bitcoin Cash.

BitPay is one of the easiest solutions to integrate with your store and it will allow you to support both Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core payments. You can choose to get payouts in cash to protect yourself from volatility or (coming soon!) you can set a percentage of profit you would like to receive in Bitcoin Cash. For example, you might say you want an 80/20 split.

If you’d like to receive Bitcoin Cash directly, Coinbase Commerce is the option I’ve used most.

Most of the stores I have worked with choose to get paid 100% in Bitcoin Cash with Coinbase Commerce (they will likely switch to BitPay soon), but that is entirely up to you and your business needs and I find BitPay easier to work with.

Because each payment processor has separate instructions, you’ll want to read those on their respective websites. Instructions are quite short and normally don’t take more than 10 minutes to implement.

Sample Checkout Process

Let’s look at Coinbase Commerce to give you an idea of how checkout works:

It’s that simple. No credit card info required. A customer can copy the address or open the QR code and scan it directly on their phone to pay.

Marketing

Once you’ve got payments on your site, there are a number of steps I recommend going through to make sure the global Bitcoin Cash community knows that they can purchase from you. Doing this has allowed stores I’ve worked with to get orders the first day:

1/ Create a policies and frequently asked questions page for customers who are interested in using Bitcoin Cash on your store or for people who might be interested in learning more. You might also include a link to Bitcoin.com so customers can download their own wallets and get their free Bitcoin Cash as well.

2/ Create a Bitcoin Cash “grand opening” discount code for customers and email it it out to your list. I used BITCOINCASH for Undertech Undercover, but you can get more creative if you like.

3/ Write a short blog post announcement or make a video. Here’s one short example from Undertech Undercover:

“Undertech Now Supports Bitcoin Cash Checkouts!

We’re excited to announce that by popular request to accept Bitcoin Cash as a payment option, we have integrated Coinbase Commerce as a checkout option on UndertechUndercover.com.
Customers can now go through the standard checkout process and will have the option to select Bitcoin Cash. We believe that Bitcoin Cash is the future of money and are excited to be one of it’s earliest adopters in the concealed carry space.”

Here’s one more from WinADay:

“WinADay Introduces Bitcoin Cash for Faster, Cheaper Deposits and Withdrawals

Bitcoin Cash is now an option for deposits and withdrawals at WinADay Casino. The unique casino, one of the first to accept Bitcoins and Litecoin cryptocurrencies, is offering a generous “crypto only” match bonus along with its St Patrick’s Day casino bonuses.

“Bitcoin Cash is quicker than Bitcoins and the fees are lower, so it’s one of the best ways for us to get winnings to players,” said WinADay’s manager, Michael Hilary.

Bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash both hold value and are safe and convenient for online payments, at the moment however Bitcoin Cash is faster and cheaper to use. Bitcoin Cash is technically different. It can process many more transactions per day than Bitcoin which speeds up processing times and reduces fees. WinADay provides information on the three cryptocurrencies on its website: Bitcoins | Bitcoin Cash | Litecoin.

For nearly ten years, WinADay Casino has offered unique slots, video poker, Keno and Roulette games to players all over the world. It’s known for its friendly customer service staff and has an active Facebook page.”http://www.igamingbusiness.com/press/winaday-introduces-bitcoin-cash-faster-cheaper-deposits-and-withdrawals

It doesn’t need to be much longer than that, though some screenshots walking people through the checkout process and a brief FAQ could be a nice addition.

4/ Share that post on Twitter tagging @derekmagill, @bitcoin, @bitcoincashfund, @FindBitcoinCash,  and @BTCNewsUpdates. We will make sure your announcement gets spread around the internet.

5/ Share the post in Reddit at r/BitcoinCash and r/BTC. This is a great way to get traffic to your announcement and exposure to your products. My personal site often gets hundreds of visits a day from it when I publish articles.

6/ Get in touch with Bitcoin News at Bitcoin.com or CoinGeek. Both of them often do news stories on businesses that decide to adopt Bitcoin Cash. When our company, Praxis, launched Bitcoin Cash payments they reached out for an interview that drove a ton of traffic to our site and gave us a nice digital asset to pass around.

7/ Submit your business to be listed on the Accept Bitcoin Cash Initiative site. This is a neat aggregator of merchants.

8/ Republish your initial post with a description and photos of your product on Yours.org, a content creation platform that is used heavily by Bitcoin Cash users.

9/ Set up an account with BlockPress and Memo.Cash and share your announcement directly into the BCH blockchain.

10/ Download a “Bitcoin Cash Accepted Here” logo to embed somewhere on your site

Next Steps?

Now that you’ve completed all the basic steps, you’ll want to make sure you stay active in the community, regularly reminding people that you accept Bitcoin Cash as a payment option. You might also consider deepening your knowledge of the history and technology behind Bitcoin Cash at derekmagill.com/bitcoin where you’ll find everything you need.

If you like this project, please consider supporting it. If I raise enough money ($1000-$2000), I will hire a team to create a beautiful PDF and physical book version of this that can be distributed to businesses around the world.

qrqzs8ehma0lnk0l837pfvwyspkq6f3l3uelcsvga8

Recent Posts

Stay Connected