Which wineries are willing to accept Bitcoin? I’m sure there are plenty of bag-hodlers (especially in the Bay Area) who are willing to pay the transactions fee for their Napa cabs.
Setting up the payment/conversion program is easier than it’s ever been. I understand that switching one’s entire program to allow crypto may be unsettling, so I challenge wineries to create a special promotion to give this a try. Heck, make a PR stunt out of it. Maybe a special library release, an experience, etc. Let’s take baby steps together
I can forsee that the future of allocation lists (or a special VIP portion of the list) will be on blockchain. Just imagine this, you buy a NFT from the winery that allows you to purchase an allocation. Only the person with that NFT can make the purchase and if you sell your NFT, the winery makes a royalty (currently 10-15%) each time it’s sold. You’re reading about artists doing this, why can’t our viniculturalists benefit too? It’s a win-win for the winery and allows the consumer the ability to have even more exclusivity to your wine club, even benefit by being a longtime constituent of your wine program. There will one day be a platform (let’s call it WineBase) where us wine enthusiasts can sell/trade our wine NFTs, possibly to trade up to that MacDonald or Screagle allocation list that you’ll never make in this century just “waiting” lol. The possibilities are endless, but I see this coming sooner than you might think.
Businesses (for the most part) work on relatively narrow margins and need as much predictability for the input as possible. Bitcoin and other non home currency payments add a degree of volatility to that input. To accept that volatility, the recipient has to charge more. Maybe people won’t mind paying a premium to make payments in forms other than the home currency, where that payment varies with the volatility of the desired payment mechanism, Or maybe they would. For me, I’d want maybe a 3-5% edge to take Bitcoin vs $USD if I was running a domestic winery (I’m guessing at their margins).
None of this is a comment on the value of Bitcoin or other forms of payment (ETC, XRP, Doggie Coin, etc). Just the volatility of the payment relative to the expenses.
BTW, businesses with very fat margins, or businesses that might get some advertising or other positive halo effect by taking crypto may behave differently.
Why take the baby steps unless you’re blindly committed to crypto as the future?
I can see the marketing appeal of the NFTs to a very narrow, high-end segment of the market, but how many customers would prefer to pay with crypto rather than greenbacks unless they have illicit income to hide?
The winery would bear the risk of fluctuations in the value of the crypto (what if it drops 5% in the week after payment?), and would have to absorb transaction costs to convert the crypto to dollars to pay its expenses.
So it’s hard for me to see what would drive this, either on the customer or winery side. It seems the only reason to take it is as a marketing gimmick.
Don’t confuse real adoption with more people piling in in hopes of their coin going up in “value”. I’m long on a few cryptos with interesting potential use cases, and have watched them soar in price, but this is all a speculative bubble/legal ponzi scheme. There are no real use cases for any of them right now as companies “adopt” them for marketing purposes only: either they sell crypto for dollars or they “accept” crypto for payment and immediately convert to dollars. For wineries to accept them for payment they would be taking huge risks which I’m sure most would be adverse to.
What wineries are only on TOR? Still the only thing you can buy with crypto is drugs on the dark web. It’s a speculative bubble. You can surely make money with a speculative bubble as long as you don’t have much when the bubble bursts.
It could be an incredible use of blockchain technology if a cult winery issued mailing list spots as tokens. Those tokens could be sold at market price on a decentralized exchange as well as validated on the blockchain for provenance, giving more transparency and control to customers. Wineries could also hold back a percent of the mailing list tokens and issue them when they wanted, which also creates more value for the winery.
The non-capitalist version is tokenizing mailing list spots as well as creating NFTs for the actual wines associated with each token, so any flipped wines could be tracked on the blockchain and the winery could invalidate that person’s allocation if they were against the flipping of their wines.
But yeah, crypto is only for drugs and tulips are much more useful
Edit: Just saw that JohnP already posited something very similar! Cheers!
The only problem with that is that a lot of mailing-list wineries don’t want their allocations sold on. Some have cut off customers they discovered were selling them on Commerce Corner. Wineries generally not interested in creating a product used for speculation. They want long-term customers, and traders don’t fit the bill.
Also bothered by the environmental impact. It’s not a simple answer and the media narrative is a bit skewed, but with that said the switch to proof of stake for major blockchains like Ethereum is very promising.
Not a winery, but IronGate has been accepting Bitcoin since 2019. Warren is a member here. Would be interesting to hear his insights into how that was received and adopted by customers and any trends he has seen.
