Don McAlister is a technologist and has made several video tutorials on Bitcoin.
While primarily viewed as a store of value, and considered by many as a fantastic savings technology, bitcoin has yet to reach mass adoption. There are many reasons for this, but in this article, I want to explore one particular aspect that is potentially holding bitcoin back.
People are reluctant to spend bitcoin.
Why is this a bad thing?
One of the barriers to adoption is that people new to bitcoin struggle with some of the concepts behind it. They can’t immediately see the use case of the technology and fail to recognize that bitcoin is sound money. After all, what use is money if you can’t spend it? Historically, bitcoin has been difficult to spend due to the nature of the technology, but also due to the lack of support for people or businesses accepting bitcoin. If people can’t see bitcoin being used as real money, in a frictionless way and with tangible benefits, widespread adoption will be more difficult to achieve. In other words, bitcoin is not yet being commonly used as a medium of exchange.
For bitcoin to be considered a medium of exchange, we need to be able to freely exchange bitcoin for goods and services; in other words, to use bitcoin to buy stuff. The Bitcoin white paper[1] defines Bitcoin as “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and bitcoin was originally promoted as digital cash.
However, because it is such a great store of value, people who own bitcoin are looking forward to the days when the price has multiplied by 10, or even 100, as bitcoin becomes more widely adopted. So why on Earth would you spend something that has the potential to increase so significantly in value
