Three Banks, a few human errors, and an afternoon in the 1980s
It’s 3pm on Wednesday, January 11th. I’m standing in line at TD bank. In front of me, three incredibly pleasant, middle aged-women are helping people with what they need, and behind me, two elderly gentleman are having the type of conversation that only two elderly gentleman could enjoy. It dawns on me in this moment that it’s been three hours and I’ve been to three banks since I began this journey to pay a deposit on a new apartment. I started thinking about cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin began in 2008. And since then, despite being a solution to some of the most important problems facing our world economy, it’s sort of been searching for the right value proposition towards mass adoption. Among the one’s you’ve possibly heard, there’s self-sovereignty, decentralization, various conspiracy theories, freedom to transact, 3rd world remittances, and so on and so on. But, like most people, I’ve always kind of felt like none of these matter. The reason is because most people don’t care enough about any of these things to make them matter. I know this because I’m unashamedly willing to admit that I think like most people.
People don’t care about so many of the things Bitcoin solves. They don’t know what it means to have a decentralized currency and the last thing they would want is to have self-custody of their 401K. People just want life to be a little easier. Forget the new world orders and the deflationary mechanisms, just tell me that I get to be a little bit lazier and I’m all yours.
I was reminded of this at 3pm, when I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that if the rental agency I worked with had accepted cryptocurrency, they wouldn’t need me to get a bank draft from my bank and deposit it into their bank for them. And they certainly wouldn’t have had to conduct a CIA level background check to see if I was fit to be a tenant. Blockchain data and smart contracts could have solved the trust problem and a simple crypto transaction could’ve gotten them their deposit from the comfort of my couch.
Now, of course, it’s all facilitated on a foundation of the permissionless and trustless principles of the blockchain. But, when I’m listening to Margaritaville playing over the bland green accents of a TD branch interior, while holding way more cash than I’d like to be holding and feeling like I’ve somehow travelled back to the 1980s—before the invention of the internet—I don’t care about any of that crap. I realized in that moment, Bitcoin doesn’t need any of those fancy problems that will revolutionize the world, all it really needs is a real human pain point. And what’s great is that it’s got one!
We will never convince the rest of the world that they should care about a permissionless, trustless, decentralized monetary network. However, I think we might start getting somewhere with some simpler thoughts, like how they could save a few hours and a trip to the bank. We start telling people that and pretty soon we might have the mass adoption we desire. We’ll keep it from the old guys though. They only have a few lasting bastions within which others can’t escape their stories. We don’t want to take that away from them.