BCC#1: The Hairdresser

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

There are 64 days left until my first Bitcoin Cash halvening, and to tell you the truth, I've been pretty excited about it because I felt like the stars were finally aligning for Bitcoin Cash. There was so much optimism, and all the momentum seemed to be on our side. The numbers coming out of Cryptophyl, local.bitcoin.com, and blockchain.poker were all showing steady growth. At the end of 2019 we also had the birth of be.cash and read.cash, and even CZ changed the ticker on Binance from BCHABC to BCH again.

But this being Bitcoin Cash, I should have known better. Over the last week or so we have now gone from just Roger and Amaury fighting one another, to the entire community apparently fighting each other.

Fortunately, this column isn't going to be about that. I’m not going to talk about the IFP, or whatever it’s called now. Instead I’m going to write about my haircut yesterday.

For the last 15 years, I've been getting my haircuts from the same woman. We’ll call her Heather, though that’s not her real name. Heather’s known me since I was a single guy living in downtown LA, all the way to the present day as a father of two living in the suburbs. With the exception of a four month stretch in 2019, she has cut my hair every month since the first time I ever went to her.

Despite how long we've known each other, I wouldn't say we're friends. She was my hairdresser, and I was her client. Maybe it would have been different if her English was better, or if I didn’t have the vocabulary of an eight year old when I try to use my native language. In any case, we got by with our small talk, and over the years, I've managed to learn a few things about her. Like the fact that she's five years my senior, has two boys just like my mom did, and immigrated here with her husband when she was around the same age my parents were when they made the same journey. It was like she was a more modern, happier version of my parents' story. She would tell me how her sons were doing, what colleges they got into, what they were majoring in, that sort of thing. She was so proud, and I could tell how much she loved them by how hard she worked to provide for them.

Then last year out of nowhere she got sick. I wasn’t sure what was going on at first. I showed up to her salon one day and her assistant told me the owner wasn’t going to be in for a little while. Okay, I thought, I’ll just come back in a couple of weeks. Like I said, it wasn’t like we were friends, I didn’t have her phone number or anything, so I didn’t think much of it, but when I went back in two weeks, she still hadn’t returned. At that point I just went ahead and had her assistant do my haircut that day, and that's when I learned that Heather was having some health issues. I didn’t want to pry, so I left it at that and didn’t think much of it since she’s only a little older than me. Maybe it’s hemorrhoids, or something along those lines, I thought.

When Heather finally came back to work a few months later, I could see right away she’d been dealing with something much more serious. She’d lost a lot of weight, and she was wearing a scarf around her head.

I admit there were times when I was worried whether or not she was going to make it. When I last went to her at the end of November, she seemed so weak that day. She could barely stand, and even though it was months before the Coronavirus outbreak, she was wearing one of those masks to make sure she didn't get sick from one of her customers.

At the end of December, when it was time for me to get my next haircut, I got the flu, and since I didn't want to risk getting Heather sick, I put off getting my haircut for a while. I ended up waiting so long that suddenly my hair was longer than it had been since I was a teenager. Maybe I should try growing it out, I thought. New Year New Me and all that. But my wife wasn’t having it. She even accused me of going through a midlife crisis, though I'm pretty sure I'm still a little too young for that.

So yesterday I dropped by the salon, and it turned out she’d sold it. Now she was just renting a chair in a salon down the street. I made my way over, and when I saw her I was relieved to find she was doing much better. The mask was gone, her hair was growing out, and she’d gained back some of her weight.

“Your hair’s so long!” she said as soon as she saw me.

“Yeah, I was trying to grow it,” I answered.

“Your wife is making you cut it isn’t she,” she said, and I smiled and nodded.

As I sat in the chair, this young guy who had gotten his haircut before me came back and explained to Heather that he was going to have to pay by credit card after all. He'd apparently spent all his cash the day before, and he wasn’t able to pull out anything from the ATM, he said. What a nice guy, I thought, because I knew he'd gone to get cash to try and save her the credit card fees. All her customers seemed to be trying to help her in small ways like that.

"Oh, don't worry, it's fine," she said and pulled out her square card reader and plugged it into her phone.

After the transaction was done and the young man left, I asked her how much transaction fees were on that thing.

"It's weird, if you do it on the phone, it's like 2 point something percent, but if you write it all out, it's over three percent."

I wasn’t sure what she meant by writing it all out, but in my head I just assumed 3% and did the math on a $25 haircut.

That’s when I asked her if she'd ever heard of Bitcoin. She had, but she didn't know much about it, she said, so I tried to explain that it was a new kind of money, one that doesn't require banks or credit card companies to process your transactions. I wasn't sure if I was explaining it right, but she seemed to understand.

In the end, I happened to only have enough cash to cover the haircut, so I offered to tip her in Bitcoin Cash if she was interested. I helped her download the Bitcoin.com wallet onto her phone, and what do you know, the wallet supports my native language. I was genuinely impressed. I hit receive, sent her double my usual tip, and when it showed up right away she smiled like she had just seen me perform a little magic trick. Then I took her to the screen with her 12 word seed phrase, explained what the words were for, and watched as she wrote them down. I had to get back to work, but I told her that if she wanted to know more, I could explain the next time I was there. Just then she saw the $10.00 I had given her was suddenly worth $10.01.

"It went up!" she said, and her face was full of excitement.

I don’t know if she truly understands what this new technology is about, but I at least got the sense she enjoyed learning something new.

When I think about all those haircuts she’s given her customers over the years, and how anytime someone uses a card she gets 3% of her income taken by the banks and credit card companies, I can’t help but get angry.

This is why we need peer to peer electronic cash. This is why we need Bitcoin Cash.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Shout out to @Cryptospanish for putting together the new lead image for my column. This is what Bitcoin Cash is all about. Enabling free markets across borders.