All it takes is starting it in some local market - farmers market, shops in a smaller village, etc.
The strategy for larger cities is imo different though - there I think it is better to create community of bitcoiners who actively help business to onboard, have engineers, etc - this has been done mainly in Europe and they added thousands of businesses that now accept.
i agree. i've tried to get a few local businesses on-board and they don't seem too interested.
And did you talk to the owners? I found that talking to the workers doesn't work. They are not the decision makers.
It’s basically impossible to use it for commerce in the U.S. Not worth the effort for most businesses until we change a lot of laws and regulations.
While the regulations indeed suck, the other countries have very similar and often worse. I think the main blocker is the mindset of the people and proliferation of very large scale solutions (like Square POSes).
The way how a lot of these communities achieved spread is by default having a solution that turns the bitcoin into fiat for the merchant. In some cases it's just a guy that in the end of the day gives you cash for the bitcoins.
This simplifies a lot of the onboarding problems. The merchant can accept bitcoin, but they get fiat and can optionally (or later) select to get bitcoin. For example in Europe Confirmo is a big provider of this solution that then all the different POSes and e-shops use. In Costa Rica, the Bitcoin Jungle team has one solution to holds the value in fiat (stablesats from Blink) and then also has a direct integration with Sinpe (like Venmo) via Bull Bitcoin.
