Pick n Pay expands Bitcoin payment trial ahead of full country-wide launch

While it’s good for crypto adoption as a whole Bitcoin is a terrible option for small transactions like shopping at Pick&Pay.

Let Bitcoin be the backend, use something better suited for the consumer end.
 
Do you really want a CBDC:

I personally prefer BTC, an open, immutable, permissionless, money with fixed supply that cannot be altered by any central authority.
I don't think it's a matter of whether I want CBDC or BTC, nor how much nasty things the government / central bank can do with CBDC (to be fair, CBDC could also aid in tracking money laundering and other criminal funding activities etc), but simply that no central banks / country could tolerate BTC (or anything else really) to replace "digital fiat"/CBDC, and while the idea of an "open" currency is appealing, no one is really planning for the switch and the switch is unworkable / non practical in its current form, I will elaborate below:

1) It would mean the country losing control over its monetary policy, except for maybe countries like El Salvador which its own currency had no real value anyways, so they had nothing to lose and tried their luck to see if they could reduce reliance on USD. Not only is losing monetary policy control a national vulnerability, but this also means losing fiscal policy control, bad idea for governments.

2) While I think the original ideal of BTC / crypto was good, but looking at the current crypto space, it remains highly speculative in nature, I would say most people are currently buying into it because they expects it to rise in value, not because they believed in its ideal and these people will not be willing to hold onto it if the crypto loses a substantial amount in value. I think it is fair to compare the current crypto space to an unregulated penny stock market with all their similarities, hell, they even uses terms like ICO in comparison to IPO from stocks anyways. 99% of cryptos are like actual penny stocks, there are hundreds or thousands of them, issued by people that hopes to get a quick score from retailers, while a handful of them yields an extraordinary return to its buyers for whatever reasons, 99% of them will be proven worthless after an initial pump (or not even a pump) and its buyers loses everything. I would say BTC/ETH (and some others) are like "blue chip" stocks as oppose to penny stocks, their high volatility / intraday swing also behave similarly to large cap stocks you see on NYSE/NASDAQ rather than the fiats on Forex market, this should be telling that even BTC are currently speculative in nature like a stock and its buyers are not really treating it like a currency as many have hoped. We can't possibly uses something with such high intraday swings as a currency, especially if the idea is to use it to replace all fiats in all countries, essentially making it a "world currency".

3) Personally, I also prefer a currency that cannot be altered by a central bank, but the problem is that all I hear everyone says are how great it will be if BTC takes over, total freedom from corrupt central banks and control of government, and no one actually talks about how this essentially mean making central banks obsolete, some simple questions for thought when that happens, how will fiscal policy work in the "new" era since government can no longer get money from central banks? How will commercial banks get their money to loan out without central banks for the fractional reserve system? How will this impact macro economic theories (e.g. ppp, must curriculum be changed?) and how do we measure economic data in the new era like inflation/deflation (the main advantage is no inflation right, look at the next point)? These things are not something that we can wing after the switch, all the financial systems are so interlinked with each other that we need to carefully plan and tests all the steps, procedures, model the impacts, draw up rules etc "worldwide" between countries and we are not even talking about the procedures and processes needed at each financial institutions or your everyday companies that deals in foreign trades. If we think the credit freeze in 2008 was bad, this switch with poor planning will just collapse the whole system in seconds "worldwide". Such planning and tests will probably take decades and an insane amount of effort and co operations worldwide, but who from the BTC developers is working with any financial institutions / governments planning these things? We are still at a stage discussing whether to regulate crypto and how much its tax should be...

4) From an economic stand point, can a fixed supply of BTC really support an expanding economy worldwide (you pretty much have to scrap the fractional reserve system)? Most people will say fixed supply of money, no inflation, things will get cheaper, great stuff, what they don't say is that sure you won't get inflation, but what about deflation? When you have an expanding economy and population but limited supply of BTC, it is not hard to predict price will drop in general, the question is how bad the deflation will be, and if you know you can buy the same tv/car/clothes etc 1% cheaper next month, how many people will wait until when its absolutely necessary before buy the item. Deflation curb spending and thus production will decline, unemployment will rise, and given time, you will get to something similar to "the great depression" (albeit the cause of the depression will be different this time). But this time, you can't get the money to get out of the depression even if you are willing to start a world war, because central banks are now gone, and you only get a limited amount of BTC... I can't think of anything that can be done because no one will have any control on any monetary policy anywhere by then.

5) Then there is this transfer of wealth problem, it is no secret that there are lots of "whales" in crypto, when the switch happens, the major BTC whales and average BTC holders will see their wealth suddenly increase 100000000x due to this "limited supply" of money worldwide. And who will be left holding the bag? It will be the people / country that only buys into bitcoin after it is announced that bitcoin will replace fiat, probably the poorest or uneducated masses that did not even have anything spare to invest into BTC in the first place, the same people that the crypto space preached BTC will enrich their lives. If you think it is far fetched, just imagine if the US announce they will let BTC replace USD today, it will immediately send BTC surging beyond affordability since all countries will then exchange all their USDs as well as other currencies in their foreign reserves into BTC as everyone will expect everyone else to replace their fiat with BTC, any person worldwide that had no BTC in possession will be wiped out financially in minutes. All we managed to do is to change the wealthiest person from Elon Musk to someone like CZ from binance, BTC developers or Winklevoss twins, made them quadrillionaires in BTC terms, 5% of world population that has BTC rich, while wiping the floor with the other 95% people worldwide in the process.

If you read this far, I applaud you, didn't realize how long the post has gotten as I wrote this, but I feel replacing fiat is a big topic that deserves an answer with some justifications, and most people are looking at this from a social / tech point of view, not really from an economic and financial system impact standpoint. I probably missed something in some areas, but I doubt my general predictions will be too far off, so I don't see replacing fiat with BTC ending too well if it really happens in its current form. But because of the above as well as the lack of articles/white paper regarding anyone working on changes in the financial system, I am pretty confident no major economies are even planning to replace their fiat with BTC, anyone that thinks countries like US will replace fiat with BTC is hopeful at best. If I wear a conspiracy theorist hat, BTC was an experiment to see how people would react to a digital fiat with smart functions offered by block chain technology, give them time to start getting used to something like this, the experiment was a success and timing is ripe to introduce "digital fiat / CBDC".
 
You fundamentally misunderstand the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process.

Not really - I just recognise that those making those improvement proposals and implementing them are very much a small bunch of people with vast amount of funding and interest at stake. Those very same people funding and with greatest interest also have the vast majority of nodes with which to vote and far outnumber average Joe with BTC.
 
@kota Thank you for that amazing, well-thought-out, argument. I feel you may be overthinking it, though, I think people who talk about Cryptocurrencies replacing government currencies are way over-optimistic. At the end of the day, you still need government money to pay your taxes. How I see Crypto, instead, is money that is an Internet native currency. The Internet is not bound to any specific country, and so it causes a lot of friction to transact in different units. Internet native service providers can benefit from a universal unit of account. As far as I see it, the only remaining "problem" is volatility, but we all agree that even something like the Rand is volatile and that volatility might be addressed either by issuing tokens linked to something more stable relative to the USD or by naturally gaining so much momentum that price swings becomes less dramatic. Let's be honest, if you are talking about volatility and stability, you are talking about the USD. Everything else is compared to it. And is that a good place to be?
 
Not really - I just recognise that those making those improvement proposals and implementing them are very much a small bunch of people with vast amount of funding and interest at stake. Those very same people funding and with greatest interest also have the vast majority of nodes with which to vote and far outnumber average Joe with BTC.

I agree with you to some extent, however, not only those with nodes get to vote. Miners also exercise their vote. The important part is that it's an open system. Anyone is welcome to propose a new BIP, you're also welcome to run your own node and/or miner.
 
I agree with you to some extent, however, not only those with nodes get to vote. Miners also exercise their vote. The important part is that it's an open system. Anyone is welcome to propose a new BIP, you're also welcome to run your own node and/or miner.
All I'm pointing out is that there's a defacto central authority for bitcoin if you view it in context of the number of those voting vs wallets/users - how it's organised and it's method of participation doesn't negate that and there is a conflict of interest amongst many.
 
All I'm pointing out is that there's a defacto central authority for bitcoin if you view it in context of the number of those voting vs wallets/users - how it's organised and it's method of participation doesn't negate that and there is a conflict of interest amongst many.
Of course, but anyone is free to join that "defactro central authority", unlike the current central banking system with its select few elites.
 
Of course, but anyone is free to join that "defactro central authority", unlike the current central banking system with its select few elites.
Yeah buying a country and being part of the world bank does have a higher bar to entry but those countries have (for the most part) decent democracies which allow for participation whether or not they have an interest in the running of the system itself.
 
@kota Thank you for that amazing, well-thought-out, argument. I feel you may be overthinking it, though, I think people who talk about Cryptocurrencies replacing government currencies are way over-optimistic. At the end of the day, you still need government money to pay your taxes. How I see Crypto, instead, is money that is an Internet native currency. The Internet is not bound to any specific country, and so it causes a lot of friction to transact in different units. Internet native service providers can benefit from a universal unit of account. As far as I see it, the only remaining "problem" is volatility, but we all agree that even something like the Rand is volatile and that volatility might be addressed either by issuing tokens linked to something more stable relative to the USD or by naturally gaining so much momentum that price swings becomes less dramatic. Let's be honest, if you are talking about volatility and stability, you are talking about the USD. Everything else is compared to it. And is that a good place to be?
Thanks, I was simply trying to illustrate what would happen if btc in its current form were to replace fiat to show that it is not really as rosy of a picture as many crypto enthusiasts expects. I also doubt any sane government of a major economy will allow this to happen, but then again, I also did not think cities would be locked down for weeks worldwide during covid; WTI oil futures could drop to $-37 per barrel nor Russia would full on invade Ukraine, lots of crazy things happened these few years so you never know, I can only hope this doesn't happen.

Yes I agree that something like stablecoins can be beneficial and would have low enough volatility for day to day use provided it is pegged 1:1 to USD, but for usages outside of the pegged currency country (e.g. US), the local CBDC will still have an edge in day to day use since products sold locally will be denominated in local currency, so paying in CBDC will not incur any conversion cost which stablecoins will incur outside of US, I see the use case for stablecoins in places like SA will probably be in the corporate/commercial sector where you do cross broader transactions, then the innovations in stablecoin should have the edge. But we need to also be aware of a fact that the company that mints the stablecoins is essentially a bank since the depositors are relying on that company to keep their deposits save and ready for withdrawal at any given time. And since these companies are not heavily regulated like the normal banks, no one really knows how much money are they really keeping in reserve, and if there is a "bank run" on that company, no one is really going to come in to assist, Tether is the example that first came to mind, they say it is pegged 1:1 with USD, but for years they have been sued for not really having enough collateral for the 1:1 peg and failing to provide documents to prove such pegs, there was also a case about the company transferring funds from the tether reserve to Bitfinex in order to cover up Bitfinex's loses as they are owned by the same holding company. So these big names in the crypto space might preach transparency and stability as a selling point, but in reality, they are really a financial institution that does the same dodgy stuff like a traditional financial institution, but Tether is given way more freedom to do these things because they are not heavily regulated like a bank. I personally suspects Tether is not as well capitalized in reserves as people think.

So I guess the future of stablecoins really depends on what functionality CBDC will provide as well as whether there will be a run on companies like Tether in the next few years, after Terra, if even the supposedly fully collateralized stablecoins like Tether collapse, then there will be serious contemplation in letting stablecoins coexist with CBDC.
 
I don't think it's a matter of whether I want CBDC or BTC, nor how much nasty things the government / central bank can do with CBDC (to be fair, CBDC could also aid in tracking money laundering and other criminal funding activities etc), but simply that no central banks / country could tolerate BTC (or anything else really) to replace "digital fiat"/CBDC, and while the idea of an "open" currency is appealing, no one is really planning for the switch and the switch is unworkable / non practical in its current form, I will elaborate below:

1) It would mean the country losing control over its monetary policy, except for maybe countries like El Salvador which its own currency had no real value anyways, so they had nothing to lose and tried their luck to see if they could reduce reliance on USD. Not only is losing monetary policy control a national vulnerability, but this also means losing fiscal policy control, bad idea for governments.

2) While I think the original ideal of BTC / crypto was good, but looking at the current crypto space, it remains highly speculative in nature, I would say most people are currently buying into it because they expects it to rise in value, not because they believed in its ideal and these people will not be willing to hold onto it if the crypto loses a substantial amount in value. I think it is fair to compare the current crypto space to an unregulated penny stock market with all their similarities, hell, they even uses terms like ICO in comparison to IPO from stocks anyways. 99% of cryptos are like actual penny stocks, there are hundreds or thousands of them, issued by people that hopes to get a quick score from retailers, while a handful of them yields an extraordinary return to its buyers for whatever reasons, 99% of them will be proven worthless after an initial pump (or not even a pump) and its buyers loses everything. I would say BTC/ETH (and some others) are like "blue chip" stocks as oppose to penny stocks, their high volatility / intraday swing also behave similarly to large cap stocks you see on NYSE/NASDAQ rather than the fiats on Forex market, this should be telling that even BTC are currently speculative in nature like a stock and its buyers are not really treating it like a currency as many have hoped. We can't possibly uses something with such high intraday swings as a currency, especially if the idea is to use it to replace all fiats in all countries, essentially making it a "world currency".

3) Personally, I also prefer a currency that cannot be altered by a central bank, but the problem is that all I hear everyone says are how great it will be if BTC takes over, total freedom from corrupt central banks and control of government, and no one actually talks about how this essentially mean making central banks obsolete, some simple questions for thought when that happens, how will fiscal policy work in the "new" era since government can no longer get money from central banks? How will commercial banks get their money to loan out without central banks for the fractional reserve system? How will this impact macro economic theories (e.g. ppp, must curriculum be changed?) and how do we measure economic data in the new era like inflation/deflation (the main advantage is no inflation right, look at the next point)? These things are not something that we can wing after the switch, all the financial systems are so interlinked with each other that we need to carefully plan and tests all the steps, procedures, model the impacts, draw up rules etc "worldwide" between countries and we are not even talking about the procedures and processes needed at each financial institutions or your everyday companies that deals in foreign trades. If we think the credit freeze in 2008 was bad, this switch with poor planning will just collapse the whole system in seconds "worldwide". Such planning and tests will probably take decades and an insane amount of effort and co operations worldwide, but who from the BTC developers is working with any financial institutions / governments planning these things? We are still at a stage discussing whether to regulate crypto and how much its tax should be...

4) From an economic stand point, can a fixed supply of BTC really support an expanding economy worldwide (you pretty much have to scrap the fractional reserve system)? Most people will say fixed supply of money, no inflation, things will get cheaper, great stuff, what they don't say is that sure you won't get inflation, but what about deflation? When you have an expanding economy and population but limited supply of BTC, it is not hard to predict price will drop in general, the question is how bad the deflation will be, and if you know you can buy the same tv/car/clothes etc 1% cheaper next month, how many people will wait until when its absolutely necessary before buy the item. Deflation curb spending and thus production will decline, unemployment will rise, and given time, you will get to something similar to "the great depression" (albeit the cause of the depression will be different this time). But this time, you can't get the money to get out of the depression even if you are willing to start a world war, because central banks are now gone, and you only get a limited amount of BTC... I can't think of anything that can be done because no one will have any control on any monetary policy anywhere by then.

5) Then there is this transfer of wealth problem, it is no secret that there are lots of "whales" in crypto, when the switch happens, the major BTC whales and average BTC holders will see their wealth suddenly increase 100000000x due to this "limited supply" of money worldwide. And who will be left holding the bag? It will be the people / country that only buys into bitcoin after it is announced that bitcoin will replace fiat, probably the poorest or uneducated masses that did not even have anything spare to invest into BTC in the first place, the same people that the crypto space preached BTC will enrich their lives. If you think it is far fetched, just imagine if the US announce they will let BTC replace USD today, it will immediately send BTC surging beyond affordability since all countries will then exchange all their USDs as well as other currencies in their foreign reserves into BTC as everyone will expect everyone else to replace their fiat with BTC, any person worldwide that had no BTC in possession will be wiped out financially in minutes. All we managed to do is to change the wealthiest person from Elon Musk to someone like CZ from binance, BTC developers or Winklevoss twins, made them quadrillionaires in BTC terms, 5% of world population that has BTC rich, while wiping the floor with the other 95% people worldwide in the process.

If you read this far, I applaud you, didn't realize how long the post has gotten as I wrote this, but I feel replacing fiat is a big topic that deserves an answer with some justifications, and most people are looking at this from a social / tech point of view, not really from an economic and financial system impact standpoint. I probably missed something in some areas, but I doubt my general predictions will be too far off, so I don't see replacing fiat with BTC ending too well if it really happens in its current form. But because of the above as well as the lack of articles/white paper regarding anyone working on changes in the financial system, I am pretty confident no major economies are even planning to replace their fiat with BTC, anyone that thinks countries like US will replace fiat with BTC is hopeful at best. If I wear a conspiracy theorist hat, BTC was an experiment to see how people would react to a digital fiat with smart functions offered by block chain technology, give them time to start getting used to something like this, the experiment was a success and timing is ripe to introduce "digital fiat / CBDC".
Tl;Dr sweet wall of text.
 
Pick n Pay rolling out Bitcoin payments across South Africa — starting with these 39 stores

Pick n Pay has expanded its Bitcoin payments trial to 39 stores across South Africa’s major cities, the retailer has announced. It plans to roll out to all its stores in the coming months.

“While for many years crypto was something for specialists on their computers, or used by early adopters trying it out, things are changing,” Pick n pay
Most people don't even realize that this is historically one of the best things that has ever happened to our Country. Well done Pick n Pay!!!
 
Personally, I am all for digital currency, but not the current cryptocurrency form, maybe it's just me, but I can't see using something like bitcoin which is known to be volatile for day to day spending as a good idea, btc can easily change 10% in value in a day, if I uses it, I would be constantly checking the exchange rate at the till...
But this is good news for crypto speculators.
You have the option to pay with whatever currency you want, this is fantastic. Honestly though bitcoin is like 1000 times less volatile than it was a few years ago and in the next few years it will be more stable than the rand and then more stable than the dollar. Patience.
 
Reading comments here just makes me realize how few people really understand what money is. Everything is constantly changing value against everything else. The dollar, Euro, Pound, Rand, Wheat, Fuel, Energy is all fluctuating against each other at all times. Some more than others. The rand for example is like 300% down against LRP petrol in the past 10 years. You need to really change the way you understand money then you will understand the importance of bitcoin. The rand is just your reference point at the moment because its all you have known your whole life, as with almost everyone else that still needs to go down the rabbit hole.

Watch this video as a start.


You're welcome
 
DISCLAIMER: This response ended up all over the place. Hopefully I made some coherent points.

It moves the cost of the transaction from the merchant to the customer. And rather than smacking the merchant 1%–5% of the transaction value, it's a flat 70c.

Not everyone can have a credit card. And many struggle to even get a debit card.

That said, I do agree that transaction speeds are still too slow. Right now Bitcoin does enough to disrupt SWIFT, but not so much Visa. At least for now.

I know it's basically propaganda, and I am a self-avowed HODLer, but this minidoc from Ledger gave me an appreciation for what the Bitcoin Ekasi guys were doing in Mossel Bay.

When the kid talks about having access to a savings product for the first time... That's something we just take for granted, but for them its potentially life-changing.

So credit and debit cards are not free. Some of them just include card swipes in the package that you pay the bank for each month. I pay around R400 per month for banking fees. The bitcoin lightning network can do 1 million transactions per second and smokes visas 24000 transactions per second. The merchant also doesn't have to pay around 3% of the transaction cost saving them money which in turn will save you money. As you mentioned. BTC is king sir.
 
@Joshua999 I admire the enthusiasm but there's still plenty of risk with adopting Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency for that matter. As for lightning don't forget settlements still need to occur on-chain and that takes time.
 
@Joshua999 I admire the enthusiasm but there's still plenty of risk with adopting Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency for that matter. As for lightning don't forget settlements still need to occur on-chain and that takes time.

What risk? Settlements don't need to be made on chain to be confirmed on the lightning network. I use lightning payments all the time and its way better than any other payment system I have used.
 
What risk? Settlements don't need to be made on chain to be confirmed on the lightning network. I use lightning payments all the time and its way better than any other payment system I have used.
The risk of crypto - BTC has lost 25% of its value between my last post and your reply. As for settlements you're missing the point - if you had mass adoption not everyone is going simply leave everything in a lightning wallet - they'll settle back to the chain regularly which creates a bottleneck which lightning cannot solve in isolation.
 
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