Bitcoin Enters US Physical Retail (a $5 Trillion Market)
TL;DR
Square payments will soon allow stores to automatically convert a portion of retail sales into BTC (and US physical retail pulls $5.79T in yearly sales).
Full Story
There’s a reason we all watch more television and order more take out now, than ever before.
It’s thanks to the likes of Netflix and DoorDash — they make accessing content and food delivery ridiculously easy.
And the easier something is to do, the more we tend to do it.
This new announcement from Square payments aims to do something similar for Bitcoin.
In case you’ve been living under a rock — Square’s payment systems are the terminal of choice for just about every retail store you walk into these days, owning close to 30% of the US point-of-sale-systems market.
…and it just so happens that their CEO (and former Twitter CEO) Jack Dorsey is a kind of obsessed with Bitcoin.
The current manifestation of that obsession is taking the form of a simple toggle that will soon roll out to all Square payment terminals.
When flipped, this toggle will automatically convert a portion of a store’s daily sales into Bitcoin.
Which seems a little gimmicky at first glance…but remember:
Physical retail sales in the US were…let’s see here…that can’t be right.
Nope. That’s (somehow) correct: ~$5.79 Trillion.
Syphoning off just a percentage of a percentage of that revenue and converting it into Bitcoin could do massive things for the crypto market!
(For context, the investments into the BTC ETFs that helped pump Bitcoin to new all time highs in the first quarter of this year? They totaled ~$12B).
Very cool!