We're Live! Here's a bit of backstory

Well it took longer than I thought, but we're finally live and the inventory is beginning to fill up.  

I'm used to working in permissionless spaces where the only limit to the speed of development and production is my own competence (which is often a serious impediment!). But this endeavour was different. I wanted to sell some books through an online store and take bitcoin payments - only bitcoin payments. The latter part was the easy piece for all the reasons we know and love: sending bitcoin is permissionless and easy! The hard part was everything else...

  • I needed a relationship with a distributor to provide the inventory and handle shipping and fulfillment.
  • To set up this relationship, the distributor required me to have:
    • A registered business
    • Various retail permits
    • A credit card
    • Fulfillment and API legal agreements signed
  • The business had to be registered with The State
    • Needed a tax exemption for wholesaling
    • Sales tax nexus reporting
    • Separate tax returns
  • Other details I won't bore you with.
  • (Somehow I got away without needing a USD bank account...)

All of this - especially the parts involving the state - were so slow. I began to see all the places where if this party or that company or this government office dealt in bitcoin or decentralized reputation and contract, everything could have sped up 10x or 100x.  
If I wasn't already pessimistic about legacy financial and business systems, it goes without saying that this experience has totally black-pilled me.  


I look forward to a brighter future where more of us can do this better.

I'm running this operation as Bitcoin-Standard as possible. All payments are in bitcoin, my business's balance is in bitcoin, I use a variety of custodian accounts (like Strike and OpenNode) to help out when a pesky third-party like the goverment wants to be paid in US Dollars. I don't hold any dollars that I don't have to.

I could have stocked a couple of boxes of books in my basement and run an online store with three or four titles and accomplished that pretty permissionlessly and even optionally pseudonymously.  ...But I wanted Bitcoiners to have the option to buy ANY book with the best money humanity has ever discovered. So here we are. I've got an LLC and "permits" (oh, thank you for permitting me to trade books for long secret strings of letters and numbers!) and tax returns and legal agreements and stuff.

 
You're welcome :)

Oh last thing: I'm not making any money on this. Assuming I break even (the Shopify<>Distributor integration is not cheap) and net some profit, it's all going to a local brick and mortar book store. Maybe if Whitepaper Books is wildly successful I'll keep some of the profit, but for now it's all going to support the culture and resilience of my local community. That's Bitcoin.

Cypherpunks read books

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  • If you're curious about how this store works on a slightly more technical level:
    It's a Shopify store (almost free; cheap)
  • Uses a plugin that connects to my distriubtor in order to pull in books and talk to their API for fulfillment (very much non-free)
  • Uses the OpenNode Shopify plugin to take bitcoin payments directly to my OpenNode account. This is a custodial account but its trivial to withdraw to self custody via onchain or lightning (free)

 

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