I remember watching my father cash his paycheck at a currency exchange window on a Friday afternoon. Not because he was irresponsible, he was the most careful person with money I've ever known. He cashed it there because the bank charged fees he couldn't absorb, because overdraft notices arrived faster than direct deposits, because the system made him feel like he was always a step behind no matter how hard he worked.

He worked very hard. He just never caught up. And I spent a long time trying to understand why.

The System Was Working as Designed

About 60 million Americans are unbanked or underbanked right now. Not because they're careless with money, most are extraordinarily careful, because they have no margin for error. They're locked out because the banking system, as built, isn't profitable when serving them.

Banks make money on fees, on interest, on float. People who live paycheck to paycheck don't carry large balances. They don't generate the revenue banks want. So they get the minimum: accounts with monthly maintenance fees, overdraft charges that punish a $2 miscalculation with a $35 penalty, and credit products priced at 29% annually.

The financial system isn't failing these people by accident. It's optimized for a different customer. These Americans are simply not profitable enough to design for.

What I Saw in Bitcoin

I started reading seriously about Bitcoin around 2015. Most coverage at the time focused on price, on drama, on whether it was a scam. I got past that and read the original Satoshi whitepaper, just nine pages, and saw something different: a system for transferring value that didn't require trust in any institution.

No bank account needed to receive it. No credit score required to hold it. No minimum balance. No gatekeeper deciding whether you qualified.

It was money that didn't discriminate based on your zip code or your credit history. And for the first time, I saw a savings tool that could actually work for people who'd been shut out of every other one.

The Access Problem Nobody Was Solving

There was a catch. Getting Bitcoin in 2017 required a bank account (for Coinbase), or tolerance for 10-15% ATM fees, or enough technical knowledge to navigate peer-to-peer markets. Every path in required something the unbanked didn't have.

The people who needed Bitcoin most, for whom dollar inflation wasn't an intellectual concern but a felt reality every time they bought groceries, couldn't get to it.

That gap wasn't being closed because the people on the wrong side of it weren't the target demographic for venture-backed crypto startups. They weren't interesting to Silicon Valley. They weren't "the market."

But they were the reason I got into this.

Building the Door

I opened the first Crypto Dispensers Bitcoin ATM at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois in September 2017. It felt small. It was small. But it was built on one real insight: if you put Bitcoin access where people already go, you remove the first barrier, the one that says you have to know where to look.

From there, we built toward something more fundamental. Our BitcoinPOP system, Point of Payment, lets anyone deposit cash at a CVS or Rite Aid register and receive Bitcoin without a bank account, without an ATM machine, without technical knowledge. Just a barcode on a phone and the cash in your pocket.

We're now at 16,000 retail locations and over a million users. But the reason I still show up every day hasn't changed.

There are 60 million Americans the financial system decided weren't worth designing for. They work hard. They try to save. They deserve a savings tool that doesn't make the same calculation about them. Bitcoin is that tool. We just needed to build the door.