Bitcoin works but tools doesn't - 5 factors stopping bitcoin payment adoption in the EU

These are based on my personal experience running a Bitcoin technology company, working with accountants in the EU and the US, and many conversations I had with businesses recently.

1. Account blocks:

This, of course, is the most common problem, especially for businesses. If you are making transfers to exchanges to buy or sell bitcoin, you can expect a series of questions from your banks, or, worse, they may suspect you of providing crypto exchange services for your clients and may block your account.

This is a nightmare we as a bitcoin company were not spared with - we could not get an account on Revolut since we had bitcoin on our website and could not produce license documents. No way to communicate that we rely on our partners to provide services - of course, they won't spend time to read your terms and conditions or chat with you - they are too big to bother about small coffee shop owners or risky crypto apps.

1. Accepting is just unclear.

Businesses want to accept bitcoin and have a cleaner accounting trail- auto-offramp to Euro in some cases.

But they are confronted with setting up a BTCPay instance or dropping an NWC string or a lightning address to a payment tool.

Lightning address or NWC string is not as common as a bank's IBAN - still, they need to get one reliable Lightning setup.

But a business wallet is not a WOS you spin up for your friend to have their first sat. It should support Lightning, have liquidity, support good statement exports, be able to plug into existing account tools, and be either self-custody or compliant.

Even if you have an easy custodial wallet for your business, you are confronted with adding additional details to all the deposits from clients as part of the travel rule, which makes it a nightmare to accept bitcoin in a coffee shop for 10 euros.

1. Accounting breaks

Even if you manage to accept bitcoin, your account finds it incredibly hard to account for this, and also accounting for capital gains/loss comes with rate changes from the time of accepting and using this bitcoin.

Obviously you'll be using tools that will either not give a great export that you could use or plug into accounting software.

You'd need to hire crypto-expert accountants!

1. Taxes

You accept bitcoin - not sure about how this is treated from a tax perspective - if you auto-sell this incoming bitcoin to Euro - would the capital gain be 0 as you earned and instantly converted, or the first-in, first-out logic applied where you'd need to worry when you bought bitcoin to your wallet first time in ages.

It is not the willingness to pay taxes; it is knowledge of how to declare capital gains that comes with the bitcoin payments compliantly.

1. Business custody is not personal custody.

When you have multiple operators in an organization or a bigger company who have access to funds to spend on materials and services, you'd need governance and access to the funds.

Which gets way complicated with a self-custody wallet for business.

Bitcoin works - a free network - so cheaper payments, instant settlements and global acceptability.

All of these factors are a win for a business - but the banking, tooling, and process around it doesn't work. It does not make sense with all this friction.

Working on something interesting - but would love to get your thoughts on above.