The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins

Satoshi Nakamoto intended Bitcoin to be used for online payments.

Which means the only way for bitcoin payments to ever go mainstream is if the nation's reliable payment pipelines, the ones that have knitted it together for decades, stop doing their job.

Only then will second- and third-best payments rails like bitcoin be called into play.

Here's a short story about how America's payments infrastructure slowly implodes and bitcoin payments go mainstream.

Banks and payments processors have also become venues for conflict.

What emerges by 2026 is a divided ecosystem of payments processors.

One half specializes in connecting Republican businesses and nonprofits to core payments infrastructure, the other half specializes in connecting Democrat ones.

Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's real-time settlement system, is America's most important payments utility.

In 2033, the San Francisco Fed halts all incoming payments from both the Reserve banks of Kansas City and Atlanta.

No one wants to live in a country where bitcoin has become vital for payments.