A couple weeks ago, I was prepared to make a thread about a local pizza place that accepts bitcoin--it's about 0.2 miles from my house, and while looking at their menu cover, I was shocked that it listed bitcoin among their payment methods. Now I'm not crazy about using bitcoin for something as disposable as pizza when I could very easily use cash, but I thought it was a great sign of progress in my little area of the world.
Then I spoke to two guys who work there, and they basically said they had no way of taking a bitcoin payment and that the owner put the bitcoin payment method on the menu "just because". Made no sense to me at all, and I was disappointed. One of those guys knew a lot about crypto, and we chatted for about 10-15 minutes about it. He asked me if I owned any alts and he knew all about payment processors like Bitpay and exchanges like Coinbase.
Anyway, this was the only time I'd seen anything like "
BTC accepted here" in real life. I probably would have spent some bitcoin there just for the hell of it, but it would not have become a habit. I think spending crypto for items like drugs and illegal things online actually makes sense, as there's no bank that's going to let you use your debit card to do so. If you try to buy kratom--which is not illegal--some vendors can't even accept credit cards because of the nature of what's being sold. Visa & MC apparently want nothing to do with that sort of thing.
I have bought precious metals with bitcoin, but never again. You'll notice on Provident Metals that there's a bitcoin "discount", but you'll also notice that there's an even bigger discount if you pay in cash. And places like Veldt Gold have even higher prices and just aren't worth it, IMO. True, these places aren't in physical shops but I'm just saying.
I look on it as a store of wealth
I do too, but I don't have a lot of wealth to store. As a consequence I've had to sell a lot of the bitcoin I've owned and I've spent a lot, too. Lately I've been saving it, though. I keep thinking back on the bitcoin I'd bought at $300-$500 and how much better off I'd have been if I'd kept it. I also think
BTC is going to start a new bull run at some point and I really don't want to miss it.
I was going to say this, it seems like a lot of local shops just jumped into Bitcoin solely because of hype, with no actual intention of implementing it as a payment method. I've had a few situations myself where "their payment method for Bitcoin wasn't working at the time"
In the past, I think I went to a coffee shop and used Bitcoin. This is back in like 2014. But since then, it's mostly been a payment method for online services for myself (domains, hosting, etc)
I used to use
https://coinmap.org/ all the time to find places to spend. It's actually cool to find small little businesses you normally wouldn't have found, even if some of them are abusing the hype.