Paid In Bookmarks

My daughters have been drawing us a lot of bookmarks lately. They’re great bookmarks. I’d put them up against anything hanging by a checkout lane.

Now picture a grocery store that takes them as payment. You slide one across the counter, the cashier tucks it into the drawer between the twenties like it has always lived there, and you walk out with eggs and a baguette.

I’d never shop there again. Not because of the art… the art is excellent. Because I’d start wondering what else that register is willing to accept. The bookmark doesn’t lose an ounce of value at that counter. The store does.

Every option you put in front of a customer is evidence about your judgment. Teams spend months making the new thing good. The customer spends a few seconds deciding what it says about you, and the quality of the thing barely gets a vote.

Even people who already own crypto, the ones who need the least convincing, say they’d rather spend it through a company they already trust. A currency invented to make the middleman unnecessary, and its biggest fans keep asking for one. Trust doesn’t transfer to a new thing. It gets lent to it, by whoever’s name is over the door.

Nobody has tried to pay in crypto at Garth’s Brew Bar yet. If I could flip it on tomorrow, I would, and we’d make a real fuss over the first person to use it. (The beertenders would get a story out of it. They’d earn it.) That first round won’t run on the coin. It’ll run on whoever is pouring, explaining something strange with a straight face.

Whatever trust a new option spends, it spends theirs first.

Stay Positive & I’m Still Not Taking Bookmarks As Payment, But We Will Give Them Out To Those We See Reading A Book At The Bar