NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — It is often said that bitcoin is a store of value, but not yet a unit of account. There are many people choosing to store a portion of their savings in the cryptocurrency, but it can sometimes be difficult to spend some of that savings on real world items. For example, most people cannot walk down the street and purchase their weekly groceries via bitcoin.
Nearly every merchant that is encountered on a daily basis would be accepting bitcoin in a bitcoiner’s fantasy world, but that’s not the state of affairs at this point in time. Due to the dearth of merchant adoption — even on the Internet — early adopters need a way to bridge the gap between their bitcoin holdings and their online spending habits.
Getting paid in bitcoin
Before getting into how bitcoin acceptance could eventually proliferate throughout the online economy, it’s important to take a look at how people are getting their hands on bitcoins. As many bitcoin critics have rightly pointed out, the digital currency is cheap for merchants and expensive for consumers. For this reason, the core of bitcoin’s growth into a greater portion of society has to come from the people who have some sort of bitcoin income. It could be an online freelancer who prefers to be paid in a low-cost, irreversible cryptocurrency, or it could be a future merchant taking advantage of the low costs of a platform like OpenBazaar. Either way, it should be clear that the benefits of bitcoin as a currency and payment system are maximized when the digital currency is not simply purchased on an exchange.
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