I generally don’t do merchant recruiting for Bitcoin because I think it can be annoying and counterproductive – especially if they don’t see results – I usually only mention Bitcoin to a merchant it if I actually plan to spend Bitcoin there or know for sure they will see a large impact.

With one merchant I asked him about accepting Bitcoin and realized his learning had stopped because he is hooked on wanting / needing USD for his inventory etc. He’s worried about being speculative etc. His exact words were “Not interested. I need USD.”

Once he’s assumed that Bitcoin doesn’t allow him to get the USD he needs for inventory it’s twice as hard to show him otherwise.

In hindsight it would have been better for me to not focus on Bitcoin the currency but on what he wants: easy, fast, cheap payments of USD.

I should have said something like “I don’t know if you’re familiar with this Bitcoin thing, but did you know that the technology behind it can allow me to send USD to you and you to receive that exact amount of USD without paying the credit card fees?” One wouldn’t want to hide that it’s Bitcoin — that comes off as scammy like a bad multi level marketing pitch… but to just downplay Bitcoin the currency and up-play what it can do with what they know and are familiar with.

We sometimes make the mistake of reaching too far to share the excitement of the world-changing power of this technology – speaking at a more complex level than is needed. Most people just are not ready to understand and embrace the complexity of this tech. It’s better to start with baby steps such as in this example, getting a small piece of credit card business replaced with something cheaper. A merchant doing that is bound to want to learn more and eventually hold and spend some Bitcoin.

Business owners have limited time and people, in general, don’t care or are hard to educate about big picture issues of money and tech. Better to keep it simple.