being unbiased and openminded

i showed local businesses:

real estate, fresh market, private supermarket, coffee shop, meat shop,taco stand ...

both lightning and monero payments

explained it to them, installed it on their phones and/or computer

i educated them about the 21m btc and the monero tail emission.

then i installed blw for lightning because it is self custodial and also has a bitcoin function.

monero gui or cakewallet for monero

after one month i asked them about the experience:

they all told me that it is tough to sign up customers.

it is a cash market. people prefer to pay cash. all vendors hate credit cards and their ridiculous fees of 5%.

but they prefer cash because it is private and fungible. they do not understand the fiat ponzi. they see that their currency has appreciated 30% vs usd and they think that their purchasing power has also increased by 30%. they look at the usd as the holy grail.

in total 16 vendors signed up 5 new customers for self custodial payments. they estimated that they met a few customers who already owned digital money. digital money is booming . there are many new apps which use us stablecoins and you can send it to the app, spend it with a card or send it to your local bank account in local money. all at very favorable exchange rates compared to banks.

finally i asked the vendors about their user experience with digital payments.

all 16 found setting up lightning challenging. only 5 understood it and could set up a channel correctly, only 5 understood how to put it back to bitcoin and how to change it into local currency using an exchange. no one of the 16 vendors wanted to do kyc for an exchange.

all 16 found setting up a cake wallet or even a monero gui very easy. those who used a computer complained about the long starting time of the gui wallet.

all 16 told me that they prefer to accept monero for privacy and for the ease of use.

in total they had only three p2p transactions and they were using monero.

financial education has to go a long way here