Last weekend I had a friendly chat with Edge CEO Paul Puey about business adoption for cryptocurrency. He lamented difficulty of running a business on crypto, outlining the lack of decent service and software integrations into platforms that modern entrepreneurs and managers rely on to run their well-oiled moneymaking machines. I have been on a journey to get as many businesses taking Dash as possible, and hit certain roadblocks, which the more surface-level refer to simply as “no point-of-sale,” but which I knew was deeper than that. Thanks to Puey, I now know the holy grail of cryptocurrency adoption: a start-to-finish, complete business solution.
Not all groups are as flexible with their payment methods
When approached with the prospect of “Just take crypto, it’s better,” only some potentially willing business owners are even readily able. As I’ve outlined before, the poor already have minimal access to financial services and would be open to an alternative, while the rich have more flexibility to experiment with different services and hold revenue in a form that is not instantly spendable to cover bills. It’s the middle class businesses who are both fairly well-served by the banking system and have little leeway to try something else. In order to approach this significant demographic, there needs to be a system in place that will make the experience as painless as possible.
For many, the pain of accepting crypto outweighs the benefits
Now at this point, your average crypto evangelist may say “Isn’t cryptocurrency already overwhelmingly superior to the fiat banking system? It doesn’t need a special system, just start using it!” Well hold on. Most businesses accept the overwhelming majority of their revenue, and have nearly all expenses, in fiat currencies. Any speed/cost/hassle advantage provided by digital currency is more than invalidated by the troublesome process of conversion and accounting for bill paying, payroll, etc. Asking a business to use an ostensibly superior money which will deliver an inferior experience is inherently against their self-interest, and therefore a hard sell, to say the least.
Cryptocurrencies lack a unified business solution
The missing link to businesses accepting digital currencies: an integrated business solution. This includes point-of-sale, accounting, and payroll. This would allow businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments into the same point-of-sale system they use for other payments, record all income and expenses in an accounting software that supports digital currency, and pay their employees directly in cryptocurrency through their payroll service. To my knowledge, such systems don’t exist, and this puts a severe burden on businesses wishing to explore alternative payment methods. Most simply won’t try, even those philosophically aligned.
Whichever coin gets the right combination of stability and usability will win
Businesses are always looking to stay competitive, and in a world rife with headlines about new all-time highs every week or so, the time is perfect to make peer-to-peer digital cash go mainstream. All that’s missing is a solution for businesses. If a cryptocurrency with fast transactions and low fees manages to create or adopt such a solution first, it will handily win the mass adoption game, in one fell swoop.
Great opportunity for a coder to put in a proposal to add Dash to an open source accounting package like GnuCash.
Might even be an idea for a Dash coder, who can speak the lingo, to post the idea on a couple of relevant forums – explain that there’s Dash to be earned for a capable team.
The idea really has some legs. Maybe shop it around, or at least put the idea as a bug in the ear of people who may be willing to take on some of those challenges. Most of the time a great idea isn’t done because people haven’t heard about it. Get enough people to hear about it, and someone will pick up the torch and run. (wish I could, but I don’t quite have the coding chops needed for it, I think)