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I remember saying to the owner, "Accepting credit cards is the way of the fu- room in our house or apartment in
ture and if you don't accept credit cards you will not be in business." I remem- sweats for 40 hours a week (or more)
ber the guy patting me on the shoulder and saying, "Son, the movies is a cash and money appears in our bank ac-
business, always has been, always will be." I replied respectfully, "Sir, if you count.
don't take credit cards, you won't be in business." I recall going to a movie there
years later using my credit card and laughing to myself because the new own- Question 1: I'm not adding crypto-
ers accepted credit cards. currency to my suite of offerings be-
cause to be honest I still don't get it,
Another and more recent example is Sears. For you youngsters, Sears was a and I haven't been asked by even one
staple of America, an anchor store of every major shopping mall. For many of merchant about it.
us, a Sears card was our first credit card (well, it was mine anyway) and I had a
$300 limit. The thing was that Sears only accepted its own card. It was cash or Question 2: In the future, I think that
your Sears, Roebuck credit card, and that was it. the card companies will each have
their own "coins." Mastercard and
Well, guess what? That's right, boys and girls, in 1993 (100 years after opening Visa are already working on this, and
its doors) Sears started accepting Mastercard, Visa and American Express— the future will be reality. I just don't
and if it hadn't, it wouldn't have survived another year. To address the first know if it will be a reality before I
question, we can apply the "chicken and the egg" conundrum. Merchants won't check out.
accept without customer demand, and conversely consumers can't (or won't) be
bothered to get one (a bitcoin or any cryptocurrency) if merchants don't accept Question 3: The biggest challenge is
them. me. If I don't understand it, I can't sell
it, but that's me. We help merchants
I think that one of the main challenges is that we can "buy" cryptocurrency; accept all forms of payment other
you can't go into a bank and buy money. Maybe the next generation of consum- than cash. I understand that crypto-
ers will be used to this, but today; you and I, we must work to get money (un- currency isn't cash, but as I see it to-
less you're a trust fund kid). Remember when we used to go to a place 40 hours day, it can blow my sale because if I
a week and get a paycheck? Now we just walk down the hall to an unused bring it up, there goes that sale. And
if they bring it up, well, there goes
that sale. Until the card companies
have it and the government can fig-
ure out how to tax it, I'm not bringing
it up.

Question 4: I don't see additional
complementary products, but that
doesn't mean there won't be any.
What we are seeing with distributed
ledger technology can be compared
to what cavemen saw with the wheel,
or the Wright Brothers building a fly-
ing machine. It's innovation moving
at lightspeed.
Question 5: I think that a few genera-
tions of people will leave this planet
(die) before we become a truly cash-
less society. The evolution of money
as we know it has changed over the
past thousand or so years. A coin, a
piece of paper, a piece of plastic, a
series of numbers or a string of code
generated by a computer today is a
unit of measure. But does it have val-
ue? Well, if I have five shells and you
have five bananas and you are will-
ing to exchange those bananas for the
shells, the shells have a value. As a
people we used to save money in jars
buried in the backyard, because such

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