There is a rapidly growing teenager in my house.

This past weekend we ventured out to a large suburban mall (again) to replace a few items of outgrown clothing. Specifically, we were shopping at a large retailer with over 1800 worldwide locations which offers a range of basic, functional, comfortable clothing items at mostly reasonable prices.

I was reminded (again) of the amount of commerce that happens outside of “Bitcoin bubble world”. There were an astounding number of people in this ONE STORE in ONE MALL on a busy Saturday. There is ZERO chance that this type of business will take on the risk of incorporating cryptocurrency payments for retail customers at this time. This checkout queue was looooong.

Can you even imagine attempting to re-train thousands of retail checkout employees to use any new or finicky point-of-sale system that is not already integrated in-store? I think that the Lightning Network (under development) is unlikely to be used in such a high-volume retail scenario in the near future, possibly ever.

[aside: This morning, I made a small purchase from Amazon on my phone. There was more than one step involved but the whole transaction felt pretty seamless. I needed to remember a password and also change the credit card preference from the pre-saved options but these were both easy and intuitive to do. I usually don’t like to do these things on my phone but it was overall a painless online shopping experience.]

There is a negligible amount of real value being exchanged on BSV (and BCH and BTC). Most of the Bitcoin “market” is comprised of the activities of speculating gamblers and traders. There are a handful of enthusiasts making peer to peer payments, but nothing that registers on the radar of global commerce. BTC supporters have already pivoted to the “settlement layer” narrative for which the goal is not mass adoption. What is the point of an exclusive “digital gold” transfer network for early adopters without the ability to onboard the rest of the world’s economy, the people who create and provide real goods and services outside of the manipulated cryptocurrency “markets”?

Unfortunately, while I have a soft spot in my heart for Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts who continue to focus on the retail cash use case (e.g. onboarding small and medium sized businesses, underwritten and whatnot), I do not believe that’s a realistic strategy for scaling as we approach the next halving (of mining subsidies per block). Onboarding one pizza shop at a time is simply not going to cut it (although it was a good start in a different time, perhaps over five years ago). I am sorry if that sounds mean but it is a no-brainer if one holds aspirations of exponential growth to sustain the mining network with many tiny transaction fees.

The BSV strategy to investigate new business models utilizing microtransactions for data and value transfer at an enterprise scale (including machine transactions and attention to regulatory/legal considerations for real businesses) just seems to be a “working smarter” approach.