I finally built something ... Our business now accepts Bitcoin!

When asked once if he thought Amazon would ever adopt Bitcoin as a payment method for its business, Adreas Antonopoulos responded that he had no idea and didn’t really care, but then he said, “Why don’t you adopt it? Why don’t you build something?” I heard that a long while ago now and it always sorta stuck with me, but I’m not a developer. I don’t know code (ok, it’s on my to-do list), so I felt I really couldn’t build something. I always thought, besides telling people about Bitcoin (and watching their eyes glaze over as I’d talk about such things like L2 projects), what can I really do? Telling people is actually really good for adoption, but a topic for another day...

My wife and I own and operate a small tea business, mainly online. I had built the website for our business and always wanted to be able to accept Bitcoin as payment but struggled to figure out how without paying more than I wanted for a service. I watched with excitement as many reported their new developments on Bitcoin, but I lacked the skills to code something from scratch for myself, so I put the whole thing on the back burner.

It was actually some crypto Reddit users that were using a fairly simple method of running an online business utilizing a simple method of crypto-integration, and it showed me that I had been over-thinking it. It didn’t need to be fancy or ingenious, just presentable and functional. Maybe down the road I’ll find myself running a Lightning node or something, but for now we kept it really simple. We’re all trying help in our own ways toward development and/or adoption, so this was my own small attempt.

So I’m happy to say that we have joined the growing list of merchants willing and eager to accept Bitcoin as payment! Our company website is www.inistea.com (the link to the crypto payments page is under the homepage banner). It sorta operates like an old mail-order catalog, so the phrase “crude yet effective” is appropriate here. But it gets the job done and beats not doing anything, in my opinion. Obviously you’ll see that we decided to accept other things than Bitcoin -out of business prudence. We’re also offering a 20% discount to further provide incentive for people to try it out.

In addition to furthering the adoption of Bitcoin to our customers, our business is currently set up to raise money for a different sort of adoption... The adoption of a child to our family from the Philippines. I think we sometimes get lost in why we all believe crypto is a worthwhile thing. We get lost in the price and the markets and forget that we’re trying to improve the world in a certain way. Sure there are the get-rich-quick folks around, but for those of us who truly love the tech... Why all the passion if we didn’t actually believe it was going to help people in a myriad of ways? Well, just maybe here’s one more way crypto might help lives, perhaps in a more unexpected way.

Submitted November 12, 2018 at 05:17AM by Mithrandir75 https://ift.tt/2Fe99Tl