The New Period of Funds with Bitcoin: Is it Now the Norm?

Increased Use of Bitcoin Funds
As more and more eCommerce companies accept bitcoin as a form of payment, bitcoin funds have become a hot topic in the cryptocurrency community. The adoption trend is being embraced by not just online retailers but also physical retailers, eateries, ATMs, lodging facilities, and so forth. Fast service and casual dining restaurants lead the list with 1,904 businesses that either have a cryptocurrency ATM or accept cryptocurrency as an in-store payment method as of March 9, 2021, followed by lodging and IT companies with 1,159 and 1,129 businesses, respectively. This data is based on data from Statista.
While small enterprises make up the majority of the companies mentioned in the ranking, some are retail chains or petrol stations. This begs the question of whether major corporations are amenable to the use of virtual currency. In February 2021, Tesla declared that it would evaluate taking Bitcoin as a direct payment method for its Model 3 vehicles. This was a significant change because some huge firms had previously employed middleman services.
As more people became interested in Bitcoin, Statista found that the amount of transactions conducted daily reached a peak during the start of 2021. In early January 2021, there were over 400,000 Bitcoin transactions per day, compared to approximately 330,000 in December 2020. There were about 250,000 Bitcoin transactions every day as of June of this year.

Will Bitcoin Funds Turn Into the Standard?
But in the end, will Bitcoin payments from a popular standpoint become the standard? The adoption of Bitcoin payments will not be without its hurdles, according to Dion Guillaume, Global Head of PR and Communication at Gate.io, in an interview with Finance Magnates. The issue with using Bitcoin for payments is that users don’t particularly enjoy using their funds. I mean, who wants to be the next Pizza Man? That’s the main issue with utilising Bitcoin as a payment method, which is why, in the short-to medium-term, I think stablecoins could be the more popular cryptocurrency payment method,” he said.
Guillaume did, however, highlight a few businesses that are currently making the process of arranging Bitcoin payments easier, which supports this adoption: “On the other hand, businesses like Strike and BitPay have made Bitcoin payments a lot easier.” BitPay facilitates the receipt of Bitcoin payments for retailers. Strike has done a fantastic job integrating Shopify with BTC payments in the interim. So, I suppose that a combination of infrastructural issues and Bitcoin’s scalability problems is the primary barrier to the adoption of Bitcoin payments. The Lightning Network, whether it belongs to Strike or someone else, might help to moderate the latter.

Finder.com’s Senior Digital Assets Analyst Frank Corva discussed the difficulties wealthy nations face in implementing Bitcoin payments in an interview with Finance Magnates. “People living in wealthy nations like the US, much of Europe, and Japan have the advantage of having reasonably stable currencies, so there’s no compelling incentive for them to utilise Bitcoin as a medium of trade in these jurisdictions. He stated that more people would prefer to utilise US Dollar-pegged stablecoins over Bitcoin if they decide to use cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, even in nations like Argentina where there is significant inflation in their native currency. Corva also discussed the role ignorance plays in using Bitcoin as a payment mechanism in transactions and the taxation issue. “More than half of Americans claim they don’t understand cryptocurrency and haven’t invested in it. Getting such a group of people to begin transacting in an asset they are unfamiliar with would be challenging. One other problem with using Bitcoin for transactions is that you have to pay capital gains tax when you spend it in many places.
To properly pay capital gains tax, imagine having to keep track of every Satoshi (a unit of Bitcoin) that you spend and then matching the value at which you got those Satoshis (or Sats, for short) to the value at which you spent them. This would be really inconvenient.
The Problem of Scaling the Bitcoin Community and Mainstream Adoption
ShapeShift DAO’s Tokenomics Lead, Kent Barton, put the main issue facing the Bitcoin community into perspective in a recent interview with Finance Magnates.
“Even 13 years after its founding, Bitcoin is still not widely used for regular transactions. The network’s ability to scale permissionless payments without imposing comparatively high fees on users is the main issue. ‘Miners fees’ currently cost around $1.80 for each transaction that is sent. Because of this, it is unaffordable for routine transactions like buying groceries or coffee.

He continued by saying that the long-term prospects for Bitcoin payments depend on the ultimate collapse of central bank currencies, or what he called the “hyper-bitcoinization” dynamic, in which Bitcoin finally takes the place of fiat money globally.

Experts all agreed that increasing literacy is essential to advancing Bitcoin adoption. Furthermore, mainstream firms are vying for network developments because they want to be able to provide clients with a seamless crypto payment experience that is comparable to fiat purchases.