“Thanks for picking that up for me! I will Venmo you the money.”

“Oh I don’t have Venmo but I can do bitcoin, CashApp, or PayPal”

*radio silence*

Even if bitcoin has world-class UX, I’m not sure if we’ll ever see widespread adoption until we can figure out how to release the absolute chokehold Venmo has on people, especially millennials.

CashApp may not be self custody but at least I can live my bitcoin life if someone uses it to send me money. Venmo has normalized digital payments so much that it’s changed how people behave and has become a verb. Nobody bothers to split bills anymore and they have stopped carrying cash. Why? Because they “can just Venmo you”.

I can see stack overflow error happening in real time when I tell my friends I don’t have Venmo because I don’t believe they created the social feature in good conscience and think it’s an awful thing for Venmo to try and normalize the destruction of financial privacy. Yes, you can now make transactions private, even if it’s not the default. No, I don’t care. I’m dying in this hill. I don’t want to link my fiat ass bank account to ANOTHER system when PayPal, which owns Venmo does the exact same thing. And you know what? People have been using PayPal since the dawn of the Internet 2.0. You already have it! And if I’m going to use a newer, mobile, digital payment solution, it’s going to be CashApp because at least I can turn that money you owe me into bitcoin, which is what I actually prefer you pay me back in. To add to that, Block and Jack Dorsey have done so much for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Of course I want to support CashApp!

In my experience the hierarchy is:

1. Venmo

2. Zelle

3. Cash (middle ground for “you don’t want to set up CashApp? Weird because I don’t want to set up Venmo!”)

4. “I’ll get your lunch next time”

5. MAYBE PayPal or CashApp

6. Not getting your money back

7. bitcoin

So what do I want? Obviously the Bitcoin Standard, but if I can’t have that I want to make cash great again and more people using bitcoin compatible payment solutions.

I encourage everyone to join me in a crusade of maximum pain for anyone trying to use something that is not this. We all deserve better! A win-win would be if Venmo integrated bitcoin so then all my Venmo using friends could transact with whoever they wish, using a free and open monetary protocol.

For starters it would probably help if I was more often in the scenario of needing to pay people back instead of the other way around…