Cryptocurrencies walking into our daily life

I was reading a real history some days ago that really showed how far these digital currencies has reached during their relative short lifetime. In California, a guy walks into a bar and pays for his drink and a pack of peanuts using a Bitcoin debit card. No, this isn’t a joke, this is real life.

That guy hands over his BitPay card and takes a slurp of his locally brewed beer. No one bats an eye.

For most people, the simple transaction of tapping a card onto a card machine and hearing the “beep” sound is a normal part of everyday life. Onlookers will have seen the man in the bar’s transaction as just this. But, instead of paying with the normal currency, he paid with a cryptocurrency.

Even just a couple of years ago, this would have raised eyebrows and shocked people, but today it’s about as normal as you can get, even without people bother to ask. This is our digitalized currency, something that can’t be touched, can’t be smell it, and you can’t see it — but it is there.

Bitcoin becoming “Mainstream”

For hundreds of years, the economic systems of the world were controlled by national governments, corporations, and banks. Now the power of blockchain technology has unleashed many different cryptocurrencies, each of which is fighting to be fully integrated into everyday life.“Bitcoin” was the big term used in the financial industry not long time ago. However, these digitalized currency are making a quick path to our daily life, as the story tells us. In the closest future our daily spending and activities might be fueled by Bitcoin, for now things are just getting started. Paying for coffee, beer, and pastries using a debit card linked to our Bitcoin account is only the great beginning.

It may still be unrealistic for many people, but it is slowly becoming the reality. Soon, we might find that parking meters no longer accept physical coins or normal card payments, and instead might only take digital tokens that are purchased online. Small businesses might also choose to operate solely in cryptocurrency, because transactions tend to be cheaper, quicker, and safer. Even mega-companies like Uber may be taken over by decentralized organizations that are powered by smart contracts.

Bitcoin Kiosks

A big part of our daily life is about grocery shopping. It’s something necessary we do every day, or every week, and it is an important part of being a human. For many years, or should we say for most people until 2017, we’ve gone to the shops, brought the food we need, paid by cash or card, and gone on our merry way.

“You’ll be able to walk into grocery stores, be able to buy them for vacations and travel. You’ll be able to basically spend cryptocurrencies the way you spend dollars today.”

But now big changes are happening. In Safeway and Albertsons stores in California, Texas, and Washington, customers can now use in-house Coinstar kiosks to buy Bitcoin, all whilst doing their weekly grocery shop. It’s not like other Coinstar machines, where you plug in coins and it adds them to your bank account or changes them up into other denominations. Instead, you are essentially directly buying into digital currency. When you input your cash, you get a code that you can redeem in the form of Bitcoin on Coinme’s website.

Online retailers like Purse IO and overstock.com are also getting behind the idea of people using crypto in everyday life, providing payment options that include cryptocurrency.

“We’re in the business of making it easier for people to purchase stuff on our site whether that’s credit cards or Paypal or cryptocurrency. That made sense to us,” — Jonathan Johnson Executive and board member of Overstock

The future of cryptocurrencies

While we’re talking about the future, many people and businesses may dream of cryptocurrencies becoming the standard currency around the world, eliminating exchange rate fees and other costs that come with changing up money.

But this may probably only be assumptions if no strategies are used.

In order for cryptocurrency to become an integrated part of everyone’s daily life, it needs to be easy for everyone to participate. To do this, there needs to be more education on what exactly Bitcoin and its digitized currency counterparts are and how they can benefit general daily tasks. As soon as people from all corners of the globe are able to realize the pros of cryptocurrency and are happy to take advantage of them, we’re likely to start seeing new businesses flourish in this arena.