Shop to earn free #bitcoin 🧡 Accelerating the world’s transition to sound money https://xitter.cf/t.co/dOkBmZEyqH
Down The Rabbit Hole
Joined January 2020
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We let an AI agent book a hotel in Rotterdam.
It came back with 2,882 sats.
Here's exactly what happened, from the agent's perspective 🧵
Bitcoin payments have a chicken-and-egg problem. 🐣
Shoppers need a reason to pay in bitcoin, and merchants need shoppers who already do.
Card networks broke that loop decades ago by rewarding customers at checkout. Lightning’s much lower fees leave room to do the same.
.@jack thinks bitcoin payment adoption isn’t where it should be. We want your ideas on how @Blocks, Spiral, and you can increase adoption within 5 years. Our trajectory needs changing. Here’s more on our thinking. Now we want yours: github.com/spiralxyz/bitcoin… View article
Bitcoin being held mostly by individuals is great. But in 2025, institutions accumulated 829,000 BTC while individuals sold 696,000 (River).
Gold went this way too. In 1933 Americans were ordered to hand theirs in, and paper contracts have set its price for decades.
Bitcoin in your own wallet can't be captured. Bitcoin in an ETF already is.
Bitcoin is the only major asset class primarily held by individuals.
Bonds, stocks, and gold have existed for centuries. So naturally they are more institutionalized.
As bitcoin matures, we expect ownership to shift towards institutions. Its ownership distribution will look more similar to gold.
This is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It is simply the inevitable consequence of global adoption.
Banks still settle your card swipes with overnight batch jobs in decades-old code.
Bitcoin settles in seconds over Lightning.
Money is competing again, and the old rails are showing their age and fragility.
“COBOL is still deeply load-bearing in banking, especially at the core: account ledgers, overnight batch processing, and card/ATM authorization. The widely cited estimates are that roughly 43% of banking systems and 95% of ATM swipes run on COBOL code, and that around 80% of in-person banking transactions pass through it.”
A drawer full of loyalty cards you forgot you had, points locked to one shop and slowly going stale. Or one wallet filling with sats from everywhere you shop, yours to spend anywhere. One of these you actually own.
Every money book tells you to pay yourself first. In practice you pay the shop, then the card, then the rewards program keeps the scraps, and you come last. Satsback flips the order. A slice of every purchase comes back to you first, in sats you actually hold.
What if I told you the dip you keep eyeing, the one you can't spare the cash to buy, is already being bought for you. A few sats at a time, every time you shop. You never had to find a lump sum. The money was leaving your account anyway, and now some of it returns as Bitcoin.
The rewards industry has a word for points you never redeem: breakage. Those unclaimed rewards are pure profit for them, and the model counts on you forgetting. Satsback pays sats to your wallet the moment you earn them, so there is nothing sitting there to expire.
"New glasses, finally. Three weeks picking frames I'll wear for years, then a few sats landed the second I paid," said a Satsback user. The purchases you agonize over stack just like the ones you never think about.
Two people buy the exact same thing online for the exact same price. One checks out the normal way and the little reward just vanishes up the chain. The other picks up a few sats on the way out. The cart was identical. The difference was who kept the reward.
A reward is only as good as the money it is paid in. Most cashback lands in fiat, the one money built to lose value, so it shrinks while you hold it. Bitcoin has a fixed supply and holds its value. Satsback pays you back in sats, so what you earn still means something later.
In 2014 a whale dropped 30,000 BTC on the market to shake people loose. The ones who bought instead of panicking are the ones holding savings no government can print away from them today.
What if 'when should I buy Bitcoin' had stopped applying to you. There is nothing to time when the sats land on shopping you already do. You are not waiting for the perfect dip. You are just buying toothpaste, and the stack grows anyway. The best moment was all of them.
Honest answer to the obvious worry: no, this does not work by getting you to spend more. Paying extra to chase a few sats would be silly. It only pays on the things you were already going to buy. The stack rides your normal shopping, not a bigger bill.
Two ways to hold Bitcoin. One is a number in someone else's app, an IOU you cannot really withdraw. The other is real sats in your own wallet, landed there from this week's shopping. Only one of those is actually yours.
What if "I can't afford to invest in Bitcoin right now" was just the wrong sentence. Nobody said invest. You spend on what you already buy, and a little Bitcoin finds its way back. The stack grows out of your shopping, not your savings. Turns out you were never priced out.
The cat does not care what Bitcoin costs. She needs feeding either way. Ordered her usual food online, ran the checkout through Satsback like everything else, and a few sats came back to my wallet. The most reliable stacker in this flat is the one with paws.
The old way to stack your first sats: open an exchange, verify your ID, fund the account, sweat the timing, hit buy. The new way: order the things you were buying anyway. One of these you can actually keep up with.