The first item ever bought with Bitcoin was two pizzas for something like 10 000 bitcoin. That was in the very beginning of the mining in around 2009. What a breakthrough that was. We have come a long way in the past decade and now one can buy numerous items for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, even coffee, as I found out at a local coffee shop recently.
My homeland of South Africa is a big and beautiful place, and the mildest and most attractive tourist region is naturally on the coast. Well, way down south, at a region called the Garden Route – precisely because it is like the Garden of Eden – there is a town with a little airport which is the CBD of the region. It’s not very big at all and is quite remote from the rest of the country. The name of the town is George, as funny as that sounds sometimes. It was named after some British royalty, maybe even a king, back in the hey day of imperialist subjugation. We were a British colony once.
Well on a visit to George recently, I accompanied a friend into the local coffee shop, not that I’m a coffee drinker really but my friend is, so we went to one of the top coffee establishments in the little town. Nothing appeared unusual until I stood at the counter to pay and to my joy saw this little sign at the till which said:
bitcoin accepted here
This was possibly a first for me here at the foot of Africa – a shop where I can buy goods for bitcoin. This is so exciting and revolutionary. It was a decade ago that those pizzas were first purchased for bitcoin, and here we are today in the remotest part of Africa and they accept bitcoin for a cup of coffee. I’m not sure how such small transactions can be successful, or how they handle the delay in transaction confirmation, but obviously there is a system in place and it works.
Personally I would not part with my bitcoin for anything right now as we are at the start of the next bull run and my bitcoin is worth too much to part with, or will be worth 10x in coming months at the top of the coming price spike. That’s how the bitcoin code was designed. After each halving of supply, if there is a continued demand then price should climb. So although I love the concept that bitcoin can now be used as a store of value and a means of exchange, I use it more as an investment haven for my fiat currency which is gradually losing value while bitcoin’s value grows.
Nevertheless, mainstream adoption appears to be arriving when you can buy a cup of coffee in an isolated South African town using bitcoin. This is exactly what we need to see all over the world. Once the person in the street sees this acceptance of bitcoin as a means of exchange, they will inquire further and learn about the digital revolution. It has taken 11 years to get this far. I can imagine that in the next 11 years we will no longer have any cash money at all, as bank notes and coins disappear from circulation. By then we will have CBDCs or central bank digital currencies. It is a fast approaching concept as China and the rest of the world leaders consider launching their digital currencies.
And it won’t be long before they are introduced. It certainly won’t take 11 more years. Right now already China is about to use their digital yuan for the first time in an experimental payment system. When USA went into lockdown and everything stopped, they were mulling over the idea of how to get the first stimulus packages to the people. They could have easily used a digital dollar, sent to each person’s wallet on their phone, for example. But they declined. Nevertheless, we know that they will soon have their digital dollar because the top head of Coinbase – one of the largest bitcoin and crypto exchanges in USA – has left to go and work for the government on their very own digital dollar. It’s already in the pipeline.
Here in South Africa our central bank has studied the concept of a digital fiat currency too, so it will be here in coming years. Then we will look back on coins and bank notes as archaic antique items from the past. By then we will all be paying for our coffee or whatever with digital cash. Hopefully bitcoin will still be accepted, or at least one or the other cryptocurrency. Argentine and Venezuela already use Dash or other cryptocurrencies, since their cash fiat currency has devalued so much. People will take to crypto out of necessity, not merely novelty or investment potential.
As nations collapse from the economic meltdown after lockdown, more and more people will need an alternative means of payment and so crypto will serve its purpose, the purpose for which it was originally designed in the first place, namely to buy a cup of coffee or anything else that you need on a daily basis. The digital dollar has already arrived, and it’s called bitcoin.