Talked to a friend the other day who runs a small business. He's not a bitcoiner but I've talked to him about it here and there. He mentioned how much they have to pay in credit card fees, so naturally I brought up the ability to circumvent that using lightning. I showed him Zaprite and he seemed genuinely interested. At $25 per month for a Zaprite subscription, and assuming that you save 2% in fees and pass half of that savings back to the customer (i.e. you save 1%), you'd need to get $2,500 per month paid in Bitcoin. The conversation ended with "this doesn't quite make financial sense... yet" but I don't think it'll be long until it becomes a no-brainer for most small businesses, even if neither the business nor the customers care about Bitcoin.

Is anyone working on printing physical paper E-Cash notes? The folks at

Noteworthy

About - Noteworthy

have made paper Bitcoin notes with a visible public key and a scratch-off private key - I'd be interested in something similar but replacing the public key with a federation invite code and the private key with E-Cash. Not the most practical and secure way to hold E-Cash but the tangibility would be cool.

Is there a Chrome extension that replaces dollar values with sats? I want to stop thinking in fiat

How close are we to companies viewing a college degree as a negative when hiring? Of course it depends on the industry, but in general

Gresham's law: "bad money drives out good" I had someone ask me how Bitcoin could succeed given this law. But Gresham's law isn't a law like the laws of physics - rather, it's describing people's natural responses to incentives. If bad money really did drive out good, people would use dirt as money, or perhaps even the words "thank you" uttered by the purchaser. Clearly this isn't a universal law. Instead it is the outgrowth of two different types of money with different intrinsic values being declared by governments to have the same face value. When the US government replaced silver coins with silver plated coins, businesses were forced to accept both types of coins at the same dollar-denominated value. So when someone needed to buy something, they would want to spend the coins that were worth less and hold on to the ones that were worth more.

There are currently over 22 million people who worked for the US government. This including federal, state, and local (but excludes military). Here is a list of companies whose combined employee count reaches just over 10 million - less than half of this number. Walmart Amazon Home Depot Target Kroger Berkshire Hathaway FedEx JPMorgan Chase IBM Wells Fargo Microsoft CVS Health Bank of America Walgreens Boots Alliance Comcast Raytheon Technologies General Electric General Motors Oracle Apple Boeing AT&T Johnson & Johnson Tesla Intel Lockheed Martin Verizon Procter & Gamble General Dynamics Northrop Grumman Pfizer Coca-Cola American Express Merck HP Goldman Sachs McKesson Chevron Uber Netflix eBay Airbnb Lyft Morgan Stanley Sources:

Statista

Total government employees U.S. 2023| Statista

In 2023, around 19.58 million people were working for state and local governments in the United States.

Companies ranked by number of employees - CompaniesMarketCap.com

Ranking of the world

Writing up a guide for how to create a Fedimint federation. Should be ready by this weekend. Stay tuned!

Running fedimint

Went to a dispensary last night and bought some CBD. They mentioned that if I paid by card it would cost a few dollars extra in fees. I paid with my debit card and noticed later that the charge showed up as an ATM withdrawal. Their point-of-sale device looked pretty normal, definitely not like an ATM. The place was fairy upscale - not shady at all, so I figured there must be a good reason they accept payments this way. After some research I found out that they do this because banks will often reject payments to dispensaries since weed is still federally illegal, and performing an ATM withdrawal for the exact amount needed allows for dispensaries to bypass this. I paid $5.50 in fees for a $40 purchase. Accepting Bitcoin seems like a great pitch to these businesses! Even if they billed the exact same price to customers, they could bypass the ATM fee for Bitcoin payments. For my purchase that would have saved almost 15%, and it'd save even more for smaller payments!