The Future of Payments

If you speak about bitcoin in the United States, many people view it as an investment. With this view comes the conversation of bitcoin being a store of value. Park your capital in bitcoin for a couple of years, and watch it go up in value. In an ever-increasingly digital world, bitcoin dominates gold, the premier “store of value,” in nearly every category, so one can logically conclude that eventually, bitcoin will pass gold’s market cap.

That is one side of the coin: bitcoin as a store of value.

The other side of the coin is bitcoin as a currency and the future of payments. This conversation is foreign to people who only know bitcoin as a store of value. This conversation is foreign to people who scoff at the idea that you can use bitcoin for transactions. However, this conversation is core to the invention of bitcoin, as Satoshi Nakamoto titled the bitcoin white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” From its inception, bitcoin was always meant to be used for transactions. 15 years later, we are on the dawn of this shift becoming a reality. 15 years later, bitcoin is gearing up to be not only a viable medium of exchange around the country, but also will look to become the premier payment option for goods and services.

How exactly does this happen?

First, we need to set the stage that the people of the United States fail to conceptualize why they would ever use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, because of the relative stability of the dollar. That is not the case for much of the world. Additionally, there are countries where transacting in bitcoin is much more common.

In the United States, with a relatively stable tool used for medium of exchange, the dollar, merchants aren’t incentivized to demand anything different because what they are demanding is the best currency available. This is human nature; we demand the best currency or else we take our business elsewhere. As recently as 2018, in Venezuela, there was hyperinflation where prices doubled in roughly 19 days. In Zimbabwe in 2008, prices doubled in a little over a day. That means you wake up and your savings are worth 50% than they were before.

Americans have never experienced this scale of inflation and therefore fail to recognize the idea that there is a better currency out there than the dollar. The reality of our society is that inflation is baked into it and deemed “normal.” The reason that gallons of gas, and any other item, were fractions of the price decades ago is not because the gas suddenly became more valuable today. It is because inflation and currency debasement occurred as our government sustained budget deficits and printed money into the economy. As the supply of the dollar inflated, prices followed suit.

This summarizes point number 1: When you think you have the best currency, you don’t think to accept a different currency.

Enter bitcoin. The dollar has lost over 99% of its value compared to bitcoin over the last 15 years. This is a trend I do not see stopping anytime soon. However, over this time, bitcoin has largely been used as a store of value and not a medium of exchange. The reason for this is the nature of bitcoin and how it processes transactions. Roughly every 10 minutes, a block of transactions is mined and added to the bitcoin ledger. This is not a breakdown of the ins and outs of this process; it is merely enough background information for you to understand that no business would ever take a payment that takes at minimum 10 minutes to process (transactions can take even longer if they are not included in the first block of transactions).

So what does this mean for using bitcoin as a payment? It means that the rails to make this possible had to be built. If bitcoin is the issuer of the currency, much like the Federal Reserve is the issuer of the dollar, then the Visa, Chase, and American Expresses of the bitcoin world needed to be built to facilitate payments in a way that scales to billions of people. Bitcoin’s equivalent to the credit card you find in your wallet is the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network allows bitcoin payments to occur “off-chain” and can scale to millions of transactions a second with minimal fees, measures that Visa and other current payment rails cannot compete with.

This is point number 2: Build the rails to utilize the tool, and the masses will come. Lightning is the tool to make people transact with bitcoin.

To scale payment demand for bitcoin, Lightning needs to be easily accessible for millions of users in a frictionless way. This week, Block announced that they would begin rolling out Lightning functionality for their Square tablets.

Once this rollout is complete, millions of merchants will have easy access to accepting Lightning payments. As more and more businesses and customers opt to use bitcoin, and specifically the Lightning Network for point of sale, more and more people will continue to opt into this system as well.

But why would people and businesses suddenly switch to prioritizing receiving and using bitcoin as payment? For businesses, it’s easy. Steak ’n Shake activated Lightning for all of their locations, and at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, they announced that they were paying roughly 50% less in fees for every Lightning transaction than if it were a credit card payment. What business wouldn’t want to pay 50% less in fees on every transaction?

Additionally, payments in Lightning reach finality immediately. This removes the headache of “charge backs” that commonly occur with businesses where a customer complains to their bank and then gets refunded, at the expense of the business.

At a certain point, it becomes so clear to a business that accepting bitcoin is the better form of currency that they will begin offering incentives to make sure that customers also use bitcoin for payment. They will do things like have a dollar price and a bitcoin price; the bitcoin price would be cheaper from a dollar perspective. Eventually, as more and more businesses adopt this sort of thinking, bitcoin will rapidly expand as the preferred payment.

This is the Bitcoin Circular Economy.

There is no telling how long this timeframe will take. The only backing for these ideas is that in the near future, millions more people and businesses will be able to easily spend and use bitcoin as currency, and that throughout human history, humanity has always opted for the best form of currency. Eventually, bitcoin will take its spot on top in the world of payments, just like it will in the store of value domain.

Bitcoin is the future of stores of value and the future of payments.

Stack SATs.

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