These "requests" to merchants don't come from some corporate marketing department like a Square or Google would have to employ. Instead, these requests come from individuals who are motivated either because of their politics (desire for a nonpolitical currency) or for their own personal financial gain (as investors/speculators hoping further acceptance will cause the exchange rate to rise.)
A powerful means of promotion indeed, what with trust being such a rare commodity these days. Do people trust the anti-capitalist financial services with their bail-outs, bail-ins, product "mis-selling" (aka fraud and deception), malfunctioning ATMs, faulty POS devices? Or do they trust what a bunch of people e-mailing them are saying?
Maybe it would be the other way around in the past, after all, the corporate guys must know their stuff; they're accredited, rich and successful, right? Wrong, it turns out that the sequence is that you get rich first, then you buy political influence with your riches, then you get accredited, then you get your successful financial service. And richer. I always wondered how these new firms rarely show up on the marketplace, but when they do, they're everywhere in the commercial landscape before you're aware they're new. Shame on me for not being cynical enough of that pattern.
It's a phenomena that the world has never experienced before.
Well, this world, this culture. I'd like to think that we're performing a kind of progressive regression: new concept aids return to old values. Progressivism enables conservatism. I always thought that "liberals vs conservatives" thing was BS, even before Chris Rock said it
