From Travel Nurse to Bitcoin Builder: How Payments Experiments Shaped Oshi
The room at Austin Bitcoin Club wanted an answer. They just didn't know Michael Atwood already had it.
Atwood sat in a Bitcoin payments meetup listening to business owners describe their ideal product, a Bitcoin rewards program where customers simply shop and earn sats. His face dropped, they were describing Oshi, the platform Atwood built after years of failed experiments in Bitcoin payments adoption.
"They were describing Oshi to a tea," Atwood recalled, "and I'm like, man, nobody even knows about it." The moment crystallized something he had learned the hard way: in Bitcoin, building the right product matters less than making sure anyone knows it exists. That gap between what the market needs and what it finds has defined his journey as a builder.
Atwood’s path to Oshi began in Northern California, in a blue-collar town of 100,000 people where very few residents knew anything about Bitcoin. Around 2020, as El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach experiment was inspiring people globally, Atwood decided to take action locally. Using the right toolkit and a personable approach, he convinced nearly 20 local businesses to accept Bitcoin payments. Surprisingly, the effort wasn’t as difficult as many would assume, and the town quickly became the highest concentration of Bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita outside of Bitcoin Beach, an almost unheard-of achievement in the United States at the time.
No one else was doing it, so Atwood did.
After proving the model in Northern California, he brought it to Austin. He had already quit his job as a travel nurse before making the move. He visited PlebLab, joined its first cohort late 2021, and began working with the community there. By December 2021, he had onboarded 25 to 30 businesses in the city and even organized a Bitcoin block party on Rainey Street, drawing hundreds of people.
The numbers were explosive — briefly.
“We went from something like 400 unique user Bitcoin payments in a single evening,” Atwood said, “to one or two a day. After a few weeks, it was basically zero. It just dropped off a cliff.”
The events created hype. But once the hype wore off, the payments stopped. Even when incentives were still in place, 10%, 20%, sometimes even 30% back for paying in Bitcoin, it wasn’t enough. People wouldn't to go out of their way to pay with Bitcoin. That collapse exposed the primary issue, behavioral friction. Even generous rebates couldn’t overcome the extra effort required to change how people paid.
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Today, Atwood points to a local restaurant as a case study. The Austin chain enabled Bitcoin payments across multiple locations, and even received a quote tweet from Jack Dorsey during launch week. The result: one to three Bitcoin payments per day across all stores. Comparatively, Cash App Pay on Square terminals, which requires no Bitcoin knowledge at all, just dollars to dollars, sees less than a few percent usage. Even Apple Pay, Atwood notes, took over a decade to crack significant adoption despite half the country owning iPhones with payment cards already loaded.
"Human behavior is a real b*tch to change," he explained. "Even if the UX were perfect, even if we're going from dollars to dollars, this is still going to take a long time. And because it's Bitcoin, it's going to take even longer." That conclusion pushed Oshi's pivot. Rather than demanding customers pay in Bitcoin, the platform turns merchants into what Atwood calls a Bitcoin faucet, distributing sats as loyalty rewards to every customer, whether they pay in dollars or Bitcoin. No app download required. Customers enter a phone number or email and receive rewards automatically.
This new model produced a moment Atwood recalls fondly. An 80-year-old man emailed asking how to redeem his Bitcoin. He had accumulated roughly $80 in sats from shopping, and wanted to know how to use them, eventually deciding to purchase grass-fed beef sticks from Farmer Bill's Provisions online. "I'm 80 and I never thought I'd figure this out!" he told Atwood. Without Oshi's passive distribution, Atwood suspects, that customer would likely never have touched Bitcoin in his lifetime.
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For Atwood, who estimates Bitcoin payments may need until 2035 for deep adoption, the lesson is patience laced with pragmatism. "Question all of your assumptions," he said. "Bitcoiners are really good at questioning their assumptions, but then once they land on the Bitcoin thing, sometimes we're really bad about questioning some of the assumptions we have about Bitcoin." An 80-year-old buying beef sticks with sats may not be the payments revolution anyone imagined, but Atwood thinks it might be how that revolution actually starts.