I'm talking to a local merchant's association about the feasibility of incentivizing a "local currency" tap-to-pay NFC card backed by ecash in order to save merchants the ~3% +$0.30 credit card processor fees. Across the entire association, the savings would be enormous - it would at least make the association a cashflow-positive entity itself, rather than something that merchants pay fees INTO (assuming the saved CC fees are reinvested in the association/community).
If it works at the merchant's association level, why not step up to the town chamber of commerce? then the city and the county... Even just saving the credit card processor fees alone yields a capital investment that could right back into communities rather than shipping off to SF and Wall Street for no good reason.
The problem becomes the price instability, because on the gentle onboarding ramp, I'm trying to push talk of bitcoin far into the future. and this is where "full dollar backing 1:1 for each dollar entering the system" starts to appear and things get weird. Here's what I asked in the Cashu Telegram:
> Has anyone experimented with using stablecoins to back cashu?
> i've been working on this plan for a local merchants' association to use a local ecash NFC card at participating businesses, with the goal of redirecting their saved credit card processing fees into local community investment (rather than pissing it away to wall street.)
it _can_ work on cashu, but to keep it as approachable as possible at first, I would want every dollar deposited to the mint to be reserve-backed by a dollar held by the merchants' association (and for the mint to denominate everything in USD so as to not confuse the bitcoin-uninitiated). this is the achille's heel of the experiment - the mint balance would be capped by the dollars in reserve and the association would have to really believe in it to put up dollars that might be lost to a big bitcoin drawdown
> a USD-backed and denominated cashu mint would be a far easier pill to swallow to onboard communities to this structure. and then the default lightning version would be an "option" that communities to switch to. and if they want to still 1:1 reserve-match deposits to protect customers from a drawdown, they could still do so with the risk being balanced by the potential upside of bitcoin appreciation: they could skim off some of those gains either for additional community investment in dollars, or use their increased btc purchasing power to deal with suppliers who accept bitcoin.
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I'm going to re-listen to this nostr:npub1h8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wq36rpev episode https://fountain.fm/episode/DsJfhL0gIuqJMeg4HSFc 1 or 2 or 9 more times. I can't tell if I'm a little too early or right on time to hack some shit together that helps make this a reality.
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