More and more merchants are accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment these days, with the likes of Dell, Expedia and even Virgin Galactic jumping aboard the bitcoin bandwagon.
But how possible is it to actually live spending nothing but bitcoin? For the last month Ed Moyse and Harry Huang, co-founders of the bitcoin wallet app Wyre, have managed to survive in London doing just that.
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more and more merchants are accepting cryptocurrency is a form of payment these days with the likes of Dell X pedia and even Virgin Galactic jumping aboard the Bitcoin bandwagon but how possible is it to actually survive on Bitcoin for the last month Ed Moyes and Harry Huang cofounders of the wallet app wire have been living in London doing just that as fina remark remarkably not too hard I think it's been sufficiently challenging but doable one of the reasons we decided was because we made this Bitcoin wallet where you could pay merchants and there weren't that many merchants accepting Bitcoin in London so we thought let's like limit ourselves to only being on to pay in Bitcoin and then if we want to sign up to much of what have to go and convert those merchants so we can actually buy food it's been successful enough to hurt that's not to starve which is pretty good yeah so we've got five merchants on wire now which is great and then that's in addition to the other Bitcoin merchants in London most cafes and retailers accepting Bitcoin are concentrated around Wong and Moises place of work in old Street however it hasn't been all plain sailing for the pair on Sundays many of the cafes that they usually frequent are closed meaning that they've been forced into undertaking involuntary fasts been forced to live the fast dine at a couple of days which is like the new trendy diet whereby you don't you pretty much don't eat for one day a week and you know most of the merchants are closed on Sundays it turns out so we've had a couple of days where we've had to go a bit hungry while Bitcoin adoption is growing steadily amongst merchants experts believe we're still a long way from the ordinary person being able to survive by spending nothing but Bitcoin especially outside tech centric places like Silicon Valley and the so-called silicon roundabout in London it seems to be fairly widely distributed I mean certainly it's concentrated in the u.s. more than other areas and what you tend to find is that I'm you know you get small sort of like little ecosystems popping up like AB stands at the very large you know Bitcoin community a lot of merchants enabled their London's got quite a few and then in Spain they're totally in Barcelona so these sort of small community projects work but you know it it could all change tomorrow for example if Tesco's decided that they were going to accept Bitcoin we could easily roll that out across all of our point-of-sale systems and then it would be possible to live on Bitcoin you know next week yeah in perpetuity then that's the problem solved is no basically moyson Hwang believed that it won't be too long before their experiment will no longer be such a challenge within a year they could more easily live off Bitcoin I think even now yeah I mean to live off it on Sundays as well we only need one more merchants to accept Bitcoin that accepts it on a Sunday and then we're completely sorted