People don’t understand Bitcoin mostly because they think it’s a speculative asset. They also do not understand Bitcoin because they do not understand money. When you boil it down to its essence, money is the most salable good in an economy, but what does that mean? Most-salable good simply means a good that is most readily accepted in exchange for other goods. If you think about it, the Nigerian Naira is the most-salable good in Nigeria because it is the good that you can exchange for most of the other goods and services sold in the country. Unfortunately, the Nigerian Naira did not attain its most-salable property because people desired to use it as a store of value (even temporarily) for use in a future transaction but because it was a requirement by law; this is where the word “fiat” comes from.

Why should you accept bitcoins as money in your business? Let’s start with a simple analogy. You’re a small business owner and you have a convenience store; you desire that one day you would build a house because you would like to own the building you live in. In order to build a house, you need cement blocks. Imagine that instead of receiving payments in Naira, you also give customers the option to pay with cement blocks? Let’s say the typical payment is one block per transaction. If your house will take one thousand blocks, you could finish that house after receiving one thousand payments from your customers! Even if you received payments in Naira, your intention is to convert that Naira into blocks, so it is more efficient to bypass the intermediary exchange and collect what you want directly.

Owning a house (besides the fact that it gives you peace of mind) also happens to be a better store value than the Nigerian Naira. If you need one thousand blocks to build your house today, it would still take one thousand blocks to build that same house ten years later. Those cement bricks will store value better than the Nigerian Naira that loses over twenty percent (20%) of its value every year. At that rate, you would need to have saved ten times more than you would have had in cement blocks to build that house. Let me rephrase: in ten years, you would have lost ninety percent (90%) of your purchasing power if you had stored your savings in Naira as compared to cement blocks.

If you understand this cement block analogy, then you’re close to understanding why you want to accept bitcoins in your establishment. Look, not everyone wants to build a house - at least not next year and that’s why we don’t transact with cement blocks; because they have very little salability. You would have issues trying to pay another person with cement blocks if they are not also trying to build a house. You want something like the Naira that has great salability but stores value better than the Naira and no, the US dollar is not better; it has lost almost half of its value over the last ten years. There’s a simple reason why this is the case, governments are printing this paper like it’s going out of fashion. These currencies are not scarce, you’re just not getting enough of it.

This is how you can get ahead. Remember the cement block analogy? Now imagine that instead of your customers paying you with fractions of a house in the form of cement blocks, that they instead paid you with bitcoins. Bitcoins are more salable than cement blocks and have demonstrated to be the best store of value, even better than any other asset on the face of the earth. They are the exact opposite of national currencies. No one can print more bitcoins. 21 million is the limit; there will never be any more of them.

Just like when I mentioned earlier that a thousand blocks today will be a thousand blocks in ten years, when you use bitcoins as money, you are guaranteed that the units that you have will not be inflated away - losing purchasing power. Think about the advantage you would have today if you started accepting bitcoins in your establishment! When people save in bitcoin and see their purchasing power increase, they are able to realize this increase when they spend it but because of how scarce bitcoins are, people will only spend it on things they really need or care about.

There are still a very limited number of people who use bitcoins as money but by signaling that you accept it, you demonstrate your understanding of Bitcoin’s utility as money and encourage other people to adopt it as money as well; and for those who already use Bitcoin as money, their bitcoins have become even more useful because they can now spend it at your establishment. I hope you’re able to build that house of yours sooner. To your success!