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Bitcoin adoption surges as infrastructure turns merchant-agnostic

Saturday, March 21, 2026 · from 3 podcasts
The Bitcoin PodcastPresidio Bitcoin JamBitcoin And | Bitcoin & E…
  • Merchant adoption is becoming passive: Square is automatically enabling Lightning payments for millions, shifting the burden from merchant opt-in to customer choice.
  • Real-world usage is growing despite headwinds, with Australian crypto payments doubling in a year, but regulatory friction from banks persists.
  • The Bitcoin community is pivoting from chasing mass adoption to building 'coherent' infrastructure that strengthens, rather than dilutes, its foundational culture.

The rails are being laid whether merchants know it or not.

Square is flipping a switch, enabling Bitcoin Lightning payments by default for a large portion of its 4 million merchants. As noted on the Presidio Bitcoin Jam, this is a fundamental shift from active merchant recruitment to a passive, merchant-agnostic infrastructure. The customer experience is still clunky, but the payment rail is now live.

Adoption is responding. On *Bitcoin And*, David Bennett highlighted a survey showing crypto payment usage in Australia doubled to 12% in a year. Yet banks are applying friction, blocking or delaying transfers to exchanges in a regulatory grey area. The growth is happening despite the gatekeepers.

The community itself is rethinking what growth means. On The Bitcoin Podcast, Dr. Corey Petty argued that blindly chasing mass adoption just amplifies noise. The goal should be 'wholesome adoption' - building coherent communities with shared purpose before scaling. For them, projects like Logos aim to be a medium that holds groups together by design, countering the internet’s tendency to fracture signals.

This creates a new dynamic. Infrastructure is expanding silently in the background, usage is growing organically, and the core community is focusing on depth over breadth. The next phase won't be about convincing merchants; it will be about customers discovering the Bitcoin option already exists.

Dr. Corey Petty, The Bitcoin Podcast:

- But the whole idea was coherence, right?

- If you just grow the number, you end up just growing noise, and it removes your ability to have a signal that has impact.

PaymentsAdoptionRegulation

Entities Mentioned

KalshiCompany
Lightning NetworkProtocol
SquareCompany

Source Intelligence

What each podcast actually said

The Bitcoin Podcast
The Bitcoin Podcast

We're Jiving With A Little Crypto Sprinkled In • Mar 19

  • The Bitcoin Podcast hosts argue that mass adoption is the wrong goal for crypto, proposing 'wholesome adoption' characterized by genuine user connection and shared purpose instead of raw user acquisition.
  • Dr. Corey Petty reframed the adoption challenge with a physics analogy, where coherent wave packets lock frequencies in phase to create a localized, impactful pulse, unlike a pure tone or incoherent noise.
  • Corey Petty states that scaling a community before achieving coherence—aligning members on a shared purpose—only amplifies noise and destroys the group's ability to project a meaningful signal.

Also from this episode:

Digital Sovereignty (2)
  • Petty and the hosts assert that the current internet is a corrosive medium for community, as it naturally disperses signals and turns meaningful connections into noise over time, explaining the failure of civil society online.
  • The hosts frame their Logos project as a corrective medium engineered like a 'soliton,' a self-reinforcing wave that maintains its shape, designed to hold communities together by its inherent structure.
Society (1)
  • The hosts position coherence as the essential precursor to meaningful amplification, arguing that true power for a community comes from this aligned state, not from its size.
BTC MarketsNostrAdoptionProtocol
Presidio Bitcoin Jam
Presidio Bitcoin Jam

Bitcoin's Branding Problem, AI's Impact on Open Source, Can Spiral's Playbook Work for AI? • Mar 18

  • Square has enabled Bitcoin Lightning payments as a default option for a large portion of its 4 million merchants, moving from a manual to a passive opt-in model.
  • Steve from Presidio Bitcoin Jam argues the user experience remains clunky, as customers likely need to request a separate Lightning invoice QR instead of using the standard Cash App Pay code.
  • Steve notes the primary barrier to adoption is now merchant education and awareness, not just technical enablement, as most won't know they accept Bitcoin or can save on processing fees.
  • Merchants with the feature enabled will not be automatically listed on Bitcoin directory services like BTC Map, requiring advocates to inform them and manually add them.
  • The default settlement for merchants accepting Lightning payments through Square will almost certainly be in dollars, not Bitcoin.
  • The hosts argue that real adoption will still depend on a 'small, rabid community' of Bitcoiners evangelizing at the point of sale to build foundational usage.
  • The envisioned end-state is a single QR code where the customer chooses the Bitcoin payment rail unilaterally and the merchant receives dollars, a seamless flow that does not yet exist.
PaymentsAdoptionLightning
Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News
Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News

In A Bad Moody's | Economic News • Mar 18

  • A survey of 2,000 Australians shows crypto payment usage doubled from 6% to 12% in one year, but nearly 30% of investors report banks delaying or rejecting transfers to exchanges.
  • David Bennett argues that Australian banks are refining their crypto opposition by analyzing user behavior, not just transaction size, maintaining a decade-long restrictive posture due to unclear regulation.
  • Bennett suggests Australia's crypto adoption survey likely conflates Bitcoin with stablecoins, muddying the true picture of decentralized currency usage versus fiat-based payments.
  • Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays filed 20 misdemeanor criminal charges against prediction market Kalshi, calling it an illegal gambling operation that bets on elections.
  • David Bennett noted the Kalshi charges are misdemeanors, a surprisingly low severity for a firm valued at $11 billion and seeking a $20 billion valuation while facing lawsuits in multiple states.
  • The BETS OFF bill introduced by Rep. Greg Casar and Sen. Chris Murphy seeks to ban betting on sensitive government operations, with Murphy speculating bets on a U.S.-Israel war with Iran likely came from insiders.
  • David Bennett closed by questioning whether regulators' distinction between gambling and financial innovation is fair or simply serves to block a new form of market-driven information.

Also from this episode:

Politics (1)
  • Senator Chris Murphy argued the core fear is that national security decisions in the Situation Room could be driven by officials with hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on the outcome.
AdoptionPaymentsRegulation

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