House Passes Bill to Decriminalize Marijuana | Hacker News Reader

House Passes Bill to Decriminalize Marijuana

usnews.com

41 pointsvirtualwhys9 comments

Question: in the states where marijuana is legal, why isn't there a big push to make it easy to buy it with Bitcoin?

Normally, I find most proposed uses for Bitcoin at least in first world countries quite ridiculous. In almost all cases aside from scams and money laundering and illegal businesses conventional payment systems make a lot more sense.

But because marijuana legalization is occurring at the state level, but most conventional consumer payment systems such as credit cards operate at the national level, those payment systems are generally not available in cannabis stores. At best accepting credit cards at such stores is a gray area which makes many banks reluctant to allow it.

The cannabis stores end up having to operate on a cash basis, which makes them a juicy target for armed robbery. There have been a couple serious attempts in Congress to make it so credit card companies could serve cannabis stores in states where it is legal, but they can't get enough bipartisan support to pass.

This seems like just the situation where some sort of cryptocurrency based system would actually be legitimately useful.

Probably because Bitcoin is inconvenient as a payment method.

And transaction fees are huge

How would they easily turn it back into cash without bank transfers? Meet with random people on the internet and swap Bitcoin for dollars?

Would Bitcoin exchanges be more willing to operate accounts for these stores than credit card companies?

Probably because the vast majority of people aren’t using Bitcoin at all and the small increase in convenience doesn’t justify learning about, buying, and holding BTC for this singular purpose.

Even if it would be nice for dispensaries, adoption wouldn’t be high enough to keep them from relying mostly on cash payments. Going BTC-only would probably be suicide given how competitive the market is in most places with recreational weed.

Most cash-only dispensaries I have been to have an ATM on site or very nearby. That’s much more familiar and convenient for most people.

Probably because Bitcoin is significantly more volatile than any reasonable currency. It's far more like a stock than a currency.

The issue dispensaries have is that they can't open bank accounts. If the issue was just with only paying in cash they could just accept the cash and deposit it at the bank. If they could use bank accounts they could accept bitcoin and immediately sell it for money deposited in the bank for that value.

Instead they have cash, safes full of cash, and they pay their workers in cash. If they accepted bitcoin they would have to hold their capital in bitcoin and pay out workers in bitcoin. They're not going to do that when bitcoin can crater in value day to day. On the same token they could just accept shares in GameStop for transactions. The problem is that tomorrow they could double in value or be worth nothing, which is not very comforting when you're a business with bills to pay.

Bitcoin might not be the right choice but a stable coin would work

>where marijuana is legal, why isn't there a big push to make it easy to buy it with Bitcoin?

They're not that stoned.

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