They're physical books! I guess if you can find a scanner :)
Deeply appreciated! We're a nostr-only team (of one) over here, so getting the word out is a bit difficult.
I think Coase theorized firms getting more efficient over time not governments creating additional transaction costs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x
Just added this now, because I can :P
https://whitepaperbooks.com/products/firm-the-market-and-the-law
nostr:nprofile1qqsza748zkamgmw4he4hm2xhwqpxd5gkwju38wqh3twmtshx8kv8xvgpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucmvda6kgtnkd9hxuete9eu8j730qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7yrvj8x one small observation. It was actually a bit confusing when I got to the checkout and it displayed my total in USD instead of sats, even though the rest of the checkout flow and payment were all in sats 😅
Yea I'm not thrilled about that... It's a limitation of Shopify, to the best of my understanding. One day!
I absolutely did. I want fonts to include a lowercase "b" with vertical bars though it (the way the Bitcoin uppercase "B") works.
You can switch the display to decimal bitcoin if you prefer - button in lower right.
Our favorite customer is happy! We couldn't me more pleased.
nostr:npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd I think we had reached out a few months ago about the same. We'd love to be included in the #circleP !
Also a bad idea to eat or drink today - or maybe not even tomorrow or the next day! Definitely defer that consumption as well. This is true low time preference.
We're officially live.
Here's a first blog post explaining some of our story (and why it took so long!)
https://whitepaperbooks.com/blogs/news/finally-live-and-backstory
Well it took longer than I thought, but we're finally live and the inventory is beginning to fill up.
I'm used to working in permissionless spaces where the only limit to the speed of development and production is my own competence (which is often a serious impediment!). But this endeavour was different. I wanted to sell some books through an online store and take bitcoin payments - only bitcoin payments. The latter part was the easy piece for all the reasons we know and love: sending bitcoin is permissionless and easy! The hard part was everything else...
I needed a relationship with a distributor to provide the inventory and handle shipping and fulfillment.
To set up this relationship, the distributor required me to have:
A registered business
Various retail permits
A credit card
Fulfillment and API legal agreements signed
The business had to be registered with The State
Needed a tax exemption for wholesaling
Sales tax nexus reporting
Separate tax returns
Other details I won't bore you with.
(Somehow I got away without needing a USD bank account...)
All of this - especially the parts involving the state - were so slow. I began to see all the places where if this party or that company or this government office dealt in bitcoin or decentralized reputation and contract, everything could have sped up 10x or 100x.
If I wasn't already pessimistic about legacy financial and business systems, it goes without saying that this experience has totally black-pilled me.
I look forward to a brighter future where more of us can do this better.
I'm running this operation as Bitcoin-Standard as possible. All payments are in bitcoin, my business's balance is in bitcoin, I use a variety of custodian accounts (like Strike and OpenNode) to help out when a pesky third-party like the goverment wants to be paid in US Dollars. I don't hold any dollars that I don't have to.
I could have stocked a couple of boxes of books in my basement and run an online store with three or four titles and accomplished that pretty permissionlessly and even optionally pseudonymously. ...But I wanted Bitcoiners to have the option to buy ANY book with the best money humanity has ever discovered. So here we are. I've got an LLC and "permits" (oh, thank you for permitting me to trade books for long secret strings of letters and numbers!) and tax returns and legal agreements and stuff.
You're welcome :)
Oh last thing: I'm not making any money on this. Assuming I break even (the Shopify<>Distributor integration is not cheap) and net some profit, it's all going to a local brick and mortar book store. Maybe if Whitepaper Books is wildly successful I'll keep some of the profit, but for now it's all going to support the culture and resilience of my local community. That's Bitcoin.
Cypherpunks read books
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If you're curious about how this store works on a slightly more technical level:
It's a Shopify store (almost free; cheap)
Uses a plugin that connects to my distriubtor in order to pull in books and talk to their API for fulfillment (very much non-free)
Uses the OpenNode Shopify plugin to take bitcoin payments directly to my OpenNode account. This is a custodial account but its trivial to withdraw to self custody via onchain or lightning (free)
We're officially live.
Here's a first blog post explaining some of our story (and why it took so long!)
https://whitepaperbooks.com/blogs/news/finally-live-and-backstory
Don't buy any books there now. The price of any book will go down over time or so nostr:nprofile1qqsza748zkamgmw4he4hm2xhwqpxd5gkwju38wqh3twmtshx8kv8xvgppamhxue69uhkgctdw4eju6t09uq3vamnwvaz7tm9v3jkutnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qyv8wumn8ghj7enfd36x2u3wdehhxarj9emkjmn99uphz3ay says so if you hold off for another 6 months or a year you might get it at half price even.
Good advice! Only trade your money for things that are definitely worth it to you today. Like good books.
We're finally crossing the finish line. No reason we won't be fully stocked this week.
Hey, Christmas is coming up, right?
Very important developments this week on the business front - getting really close to opening with full inventory!
I like where this is headed
Good tip, won't call it a sale. I'm not the one changing the price, anyway, it's everyone else in the world ;)