# From Store of Value to Daily Spend

Source: https://gilroberts.substack.com/p/from-store-of-value-to-daily-spend

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## TL;DR

DC Fintech Week revealed a subtle but consequential shift in how the future of money is being shaped. The crowd has moved from founders to operators, from speculation to deployment, and from disruption to integration. Stablecoins and tokenized assets dominated the conversation, not as ideology but as infrastructure, while Bitcoin’s presence as a medium of exchange was notably thin. This article is not a verdict on Bitcoin’s design or destiny, but an opening diagnosis. If Bitcoin aims to function as money in daily economic life, its absence from the rooms where monetary coordination is forming may matter more than open opposition ever did.

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## Denim in a Sea of Suits

I knew something was off almost immediately. Walking into [DC Fintech Week](https://dcfintechweek.org/) 2025 in designer denim, I felt the familiar comfort of being a Bitcoiner in a mixed crowd, accustomed to being slightly out of place, patiently observant, and a bit of the odd one. That familiar feeling did not last long. The crowd dominance of crypto founders in hoodies, so visible in years like 2022, was gone. In their place stood a sea of tailored suits, polished shoes, and the unmistakable posture of people accustomed to being taken seriously at all times. This was not a crowd dabbling in the future of finance. This was a crowd actively creating it.

Day One unfolded against the backdrop of Amazon’s HQ2, a symbol of institutional scale and quiet permanence. Day Two moved to the [National Union Building](https://www.nationalunionbuildingdc.com/), where smaller rooms filled quickly and conversations spilled into hallways. What struck me was not just who was present, but who was not. The vocabulary sounded familiar, but the speakers had changed. Bankers, consultants, regulators, and infrastructure specialists dominated the agenda. Out went Sam Bankman-Fried style discussions of abstract utility. In came Federal Reserve Governor Waller commenting on the Fed’s progress with zero-knowledge rollups. The pit in my Bitcoiner stomach hollowed. These conversations were not aspirational hype. They were operational, grounded in timelines, current regulations, and trillion dollar scale deployment realities. Stablecoins, tokenization, and cross-border instant settlement had found a new home, now in the hands of highly skilled and deeply scaled legacy operators.

At first, I tried to explain away the discomfort as superficial. Perhaps I was simply underdressed or out of rhythm. But as the sessions continued and box lunches disappeared, it became clear that the unease ran much deeper than I wanted to admit. This was not merely a conference evolving with the market. It was a signal that the center of gravity had shifted. Decisions about how global money should move, settle, and be supervised were being discussed with little to no reference to Bitcoin at all. The change in attendee profile was unmistakable, and with it came a tone that felt less like disruption and more like consolidation.

For years, Bitcoiners have grown comfortable being hoodie-clad rebels on the fringe, skeptical of institutions and wary of formal power, confident that the protocol itself would outlast any room it was not invited into. Standing in DC, surrounded by professionals implementing the next generation of financial rails, I began to question whether that posture alone was still sufficient. Not because Bitcoin had lost anything, but because the board on which the game was being played appeared to be rearranging itself in real time.

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## The Crowd Shift: From Builders to Operators

What stood out most about DC Fintech Week 2025 was not the absence of innovation, but its character. [Earlier iterations of the conference](https://dcfintechweek.org/fintech-week-replay/) were filled by founders explaining what might be possible with new layers and coins. This year’s conversations were led by people responsible for regulated systems already operating at scale. Titles mattered. Institutional affiliations mattered. Regulatory fluency mattered. The speculative energy of earlier crypto gatherings had been replaced by a quieter, more deliberate seriousness.

This shift was evident not only on panels but in informal conversations. The cramped stairwells and hallways of the National Union Building made it impossible not to overhear discussions. Talk centered on compliance timelines, jurisdictional coordination, and operational risk. The framing had changed. Instead of debating whether some new layer might become the future of payments, speakers discussed how banks could deploy tokenized deposits at scale without breaking existing systems or compliance regimes. The focus was mass integration at a global scale, not the next altcoin driven revolution.

Bitcoin’s absence from these discussions was subtle rather than explicit. No one dismissed Bitcoin outright. In fact, nearly everyone I spoke with expressed some level of appreciation for it. Still, Bitcoin was not central to the operational problems being addressed, especially at the scale and within the compliance heavy environments under discussion. In rooms focused on settlement finality, reporting obligations, and cross-border coordination, Bitcoin appeared more as a reference point for speculative performance than as a working component.

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## Ambient Money: Stablecoins, Tokens, and the Language of Legibility

Stablecoins and real world asset tokens were everywhere, though not in the way Bitcoiners often imagine. They were not pitched as disruptive alternatives or ideological statements. That posture had largely exited with the hoodies. Instead, these instruments were treated as tools, legible, governable, and adaptable to existing institutional and regulatory reflexes. Their appeal lay not in philosophical alignment but in operational convenience and cost savings.

What became clear is that institutional adoption often follows legibility before superiority. Financial instruments that fit existing mental models, regulatory categories, and balance sheet logic tend to move faster than those requiring conceptual rewiring. Stablecoins, regardless of one’s opinion of them, speak a language institutions already understand. Tokenized assets slot neatly into long standing frameworks governing claims, collateral, and custody.

For Bitcoiners, it is tempting to recoil at this language, to hear familiar terms deployed in unfamiliar ways and assume capitulation or confusion. Understanding the environment, however, does not require endorsement of its outcomes. Observing how institutions speak about money is not the same as agreeing with their conclusions. What matters is recognizing that these instruments function as placeholders for needs Bitcoin itself ultimately claims to satisfy. Speed, clarity, auditability, and settlement confidence are not altcoin virtues. They are basic monetary ones. The prominence of stablecoins and tokenized assets does not diminish Bitcoin’s relevance. It clarifies the terrain on which relevance is contested.

Bitcoin resists easy categorization. Its strength lies in its independence from institutional guarantees, yet that same independence can render it opaque in environments where accountability and supervision are prerequisites for adoption. This tension was not debated openly at the conference. It surfaced quietly in what people chose to discuss, and just as importantly, in what they did not.

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## Bitcoin’s Role Drift: From Asset to Infrastructure

Bitcoin’s cultural narrative has long centered on its role as a store of value. The digital gold framing, positioned outside the reach of discretionary monetary policy, has served it well during periods of macroeconomic uncertainty. But money does not live on balance sheets or in cold wallets alone. It lives in transactions, settlement systems, and everyday economic coordination among businesses and households.

What felt different at DC Fintech Week was the realization that the infrastructure conversation is advancing independently of Bitcoin’s self conception. Payment rails, settlement layers, and tokenized representations of value are being built with or without Bitcoin in mind. The strategically timed launch of Block’s Square Terminal Bitcoin pilot with Compass Coffee stood out precisely because it was an exception. It offered a glimpse of Bitcoin functioning as money rather than remaining an abstract asset.

Beneath this discussion sat a quieter implication. When a monetary system is not actively used to move value, others begin defining what use looks like on its behalf. This happens not through malice or conspiracy, but through proximity and necessity. Systems that handle payroll, compliance, settlement, and reporting harden into defaults because they are present, accessible, and reliable when decisions must be made.

Bitcoin’s success as a store of value has insulated it from some of these pressures. The asset can thrive even while surrounding infrastructure evolves without it. But money that is not routinely exercised as money risks becoming adjacent to the systems shaping daily economic life rather than embedded within them. This is not an argument that Bitcoin must chase every payment rail or institutional standard. It is an observation that when Bitcoin abstains from defining its role in everyday coordination, that role does not remain empty. It is quietly filled by others. The deeper concern was not whether Bitcoin works, but whether it is being positioned to matter in the places where money’s everyday meaning is actively negotiated for billions of people.

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## Historical Context: Money Evolves Where Participation Exists

History offers a useful, if imperfect, lens. Monetary systems rarely change through abrupt replacement relative to the span of human history. They evolve through overlapping regimes shaped by participation, governance, and trust. The free banking era in the United States illustrates this dynamic. Competing issuers, constrained by redemption requirements and market discipline, coexisted within a loose framework until systemic and political pressures demanded greater coordination.

What history suggests is not that systems fail suddenly, but that they evolve through periods of informal coordination followed by attempts at formalization. Authority consolidates only after fragmentation becomes operationally costly. Before that point, overlapping arrangements coexist, compete, and adapt without clear resolution. These transitions are rarely obvious while underway. Participants experience them as pragmatic responses to local problems rather than as structural shifts. Only later do they appear as inflection points. The mechanisms change first. The language follows.

Bitcoin’s current moment shares many of these characteristics. Competing approaches, informal norms, and unresolved coordination questions persist alongside growing external pressure for clarity and reliability. History does not tell us what Bitcoin will become. It does remind us that monetary systems are shaped as much by who participates in their evolution as by the ideals with which they begin.

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## Fragmented Responsibility: Which Bitcoin Is Missing?

One realization that surfaced repeatedly during conversations was that Bitcoin is rarely treated as a singular actor. Once I disclosed that I was a Bitcoiner, the follow up question was almost always which kind. Many of the professionals in attendance clearly understood Bitcoin’s layers, even if they did not name them as such. Miners, developers, exchanges, wallet providers, merchants, and users operate under distinct incentives and constraints, much like the layered structure of traditional finance. When Bitcoin is absent from institutional rooms, it is not always clear which segment should be present.

Each group experiences this absence differently. Developers feel pressure without a clear path for guidance or recourse. Businesses experience compliance responsibilities imposed unilaterally. Miners face infrastructure demands without representation. End users feel the effects indirectly, through friction elsewhere in the technical stack or through price volatility.

Because responsibility is distributed, hesitation is distributed as well. No single actor feels empowered to speak for the whole, and those who attempt to do so often face backlash. There is no shared venue where coordination and accountability can naturally emerge. This diffusion has historically protected Bitcoin from capture, but it has also made engagement asymmetrical. Institutions expect dialogue. When none appears, they tend to fill the vacuum according to their own incentives.

What was missing at the conference was not advocacy or lobbying, but a recognizable surface for interaction. There was no obvious place for curious bankers to ask questions without assumptions of control or endorsement. All the institutions Bitcoin might seek to influence were present. Bitcoin, collectively, was not. This absence is structural rather than ideological. It points to a tension that will grow as Bitcoin increasingly intersects with systems that require explicit coordination to function.

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## Returning to DC: Scenes from the Vibe Shift

By the final sessions, the pattern was unmistakable. Panels on cross border settlement filled quickly. Regulators spoke openly about experimentation in live environments, describing how they were already testing the transfer of billions of dollars in assets, with hundreds of billions to follow. Consultants mapped ecosystems for instant settlement of cross jurisdictional real world assets. Meanwhile, Bitcoin surfaced primarily as a novel way to pay for coffee during the conference.

My discomfort lingered. As the event wound down, I stopped listening for mentions of Bitcoin and began paying attention to how decisions were framed in its absence. Which problems were considered immediately solvable. Which constraints were treated as immovable. Which fiat based assumptions passed without challenge.

Bitcoin had not been rejected. The hoodies had simply been moved far enough aside for a clearer view of a timeline where Bitcoin does not advance beyond store of value status. That realization explained the pit in my stomach. In that moment, I understood what being underdressed at a familiar conference truly signaled. I made a point of wearing my best hoodie the following day.

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## Leaving the Room Where Decisions Are Being Made

Stepping onto F Street at the close of the conference, the evening air was calm. The storm was internal. As I walked back toward [Adams Morgan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Morgan), the implications of what I had seen began to settle. I realized I had already started shifting my focus away from store of value debates toward the emerging contest over medium of exchange relevance. The future will involve harder conversations about daily money, infrastructure at scale, and the power that accompanies control.

What I witnessed was not an argument against Bitcoin or a declaration of its irrelevance. It was something quieter and more consequential. Institutions are already building the next layer of financial infrastructure at full capacity, and they are doing so in rooms where Bitcoin’s presence remains faint.

This is not a story of doom or triumph. It is a story of proximity to decision making. It asks who shows up when standards are drafted, when settlement assumptions form, and when governance moves from theory into practice. Bitcoin’s protocol does not care about these rooms. The humans and organizations that determine how money is used each day do.

Bitcoin may ultimately prove resilient regardless of institutional preferences. Resilience alone, however, does not determine how quickly or in what form a monetary system integrates into daily economic life. That depends on participation, legibility, and engagement with coordination realities. By the time I reached Adams Morgan, it was clear that the question is no longer whether Bitcoin survives. The question is how, where, and alongside whom it evolves and competes.

What follows in this series is an attempt to understand the structures being built with and without Bitcoin, the incentives driving them, and the implications for a sovereign monetary system that has so far preferred to remain outside the room.

After the Institutions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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## Citations, Further Reading, & Glossary

### Cites

DC Fintech Week. (2025). Conference programming and panel discussions. Retrieved from https://dcfintechweek.org. This source provides the primary empirical context for the article, grounding observations about institutional attendance, regulatory tone, stablecoins, real-world assets, and the shift from speculative crypto narratives to operational financial infrastructure.

Waller, C. J. (2025). Remarks on payments innovation and financial infrastructure \[Speech\]. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. - Governor Waller’s remarks are referenced indirectly to support the article’s depiction of central bank engagement with advanced cryptographic techniques and modern settlement infrastructure, illustrating how institutional actors are already experimenting beyond legacy rails.

Saylor, M. (2024-25). Bitcoin and the transition from store of value to medium of exchange \[General Remarks\]. These remarks are used descriptively to contextualize the growing acknowledgment, even among long-term Bitcoin advocates, that Bitcoin’s evolution toward everyday monetary use represents a distinct and challenging phase.

Rockoff, H. (1974). The free banking era: A re-examination. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 6(2), 141–167. Rockoff’s analysis informs the article’s historical framing of decentralized monetary issuance, competitive banking, and the institutional constraints that shaped early monetary coordination in the United States.

Rolnick, A. J., & Weber, W. E. (1988). Explaining the demand for free bank notes. Journal of Monetary Economics, 21(1), 47–71. This work supports discussion of trust, redemption credibility, and market discipline in historical monetary systems, offering parallels to contemporary questions about legitimacy and adoption.

Friedman, M., & Schwartz, A. J. (1963). A monetary history of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton University Press. Friedman and Schwartz provide macro-historical context for the transition from decentralized banking arrangements toward centralized monetary coordination, framing the long-term institutional pressures that shape monetary systems.

### Further Readings

**[The Hierarchy of Money](https://sites.bu.edu/perry/files/2019/04/Mehrling_P_FESeminar_Sp12-02.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com)** by Perry Mehrling. This maps how money actually functions as infrastructure rather than ideology, focusing on settlement layers, liquidity backstops, and institutional positioning. It aligns closely with your article’s observation that stablecoins and tokenized assets dominate not because they are philosophically superior, but because they are legible to institutions operating at scale. Mehrling’s framework helps explain why Bitcoin’s absence from operational rooms matters, even if Bitcoin itself remains resilient.  
  
**[The Code of Capital](https://tr.ee/j7wB7d)** by Katharina Pistor. This work complements the arguments about fragmentation and governance by showing how assets gain durability, priority, and power through legal and institutional encoding. Pistor explains why institutions default to instruments that already fit legal and regulatory scaffolding. The book provides a lens for understanding why tokenized deposits and stablecoins advance quickly once they become legally legible, and why systems that resist formalization often remain adjacent to power rather than embedded within it.

### Article Glossary

_Bitcoin_

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital monetary network that enables peer-to-peer value transfer without a central authority. In this article, Bitcoin is analyzed as a monetary system transitioning from a store of value toward broader medium-of-exchange relevance within institutional financial infrastructure.

_Store of Value (SoV)_

A store of value is a monetary function describing an asset’s ability to preserve purchasing power over time. Bitcoin’s success as a store of value forms the foundation of the article’s argument, while also highlighting the limits of remaining primarily in this role.

_Medium of Exchange (MoE)_

A medium of exchange is money used to facilitate transactions, settlement, and daily economic activity. The article frames Bitcoin’s limited institutional use as a medium of exchange as a strategic gap rather than a technical failure.

_Institutional Money_

Institutional money refers to monetary instruments operating within regulated financial systems, including banks, payment networks, and settlement infrastructure. Examples discussed include stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and real-world asset tokens.

_Stablecoin_

A stablecoin is a digital asset designed to maintain a stable value, typically pegged to a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar. In the article, stablecoins are treated as operational tools for settlement and coordination rather than ideological competitors to Bitcoin.

_Tokenization_

Tokenization is the process of representing financial assets or claims as digital tokens on a blockchain or distributed ledger. The article discusses tokenization as a method institutions use to improve settlement efficiency, transparency, and operational control.

_Real-World Asset (RWA) Token_

A real-world asset token is a blockchain-based representation of an off-chain asset such as bonds, commodities, or real estate. RWAs appear prominently in the article as institutionally legible instruments compatible with existing legal frameworks.

_Tokenized Deposit_

A tokenized deposit is a digital representation of a traditional bank deposit issued on a blockchain or similar system. The article describes tokenized deposits as extensions of existing banking liabilities rather than replacements for them.

_Financial Infrastructure_

Financial infrastructure consists of the systems that enable money to move, settle, and be recorded, including payment rails, clearing mechanisms, custody systems, and compliance processes. The article emphasizes that infrastructure decisions shape monetary relevance more than ideology.

_Settlement_

Settlement is the final transfer of value that completes a financial transaction. Settlement speed, certainty, and auditability are recurring themes in institutional adoption of digital monetary systems discussed in the article.

_Institutional Legibility_

Institutional legibility is the degree to which a monetary instrument is understandable, governable, and compatible with legal, regulatory, and operational frameworks. The article argues that adoption follows legibility before technical superiority.

_Governance_

Governance refers to the formal and informal processes through which rules are set, decisions are made, and disputes are resolved within a system. In the article, governance appears as an implicit force shaping monetary systems rather than a centralized authority.

_Decentralization_

Decentralization is a system property in which control and decision-making are distributed rather than centralized. The article explores how decentralization complicates interaction with institutions that expect identifiable counterparts.

_Economic Coordination_

Economic coordination is the ability of a monetary system to facilitate predictable transactions, settlement, and accounting across many actors. The article frames coordination as a prerequisite for money operating at institutional scale.

_Institutional Adoption_

Institutional adoption is the process by which regulated financial entities integrate new technologies into existing systems. The article portrays adoption as driven by operational fit, compliance clarity, and risk management rather than ideology.

_Monetary Legitimacy_

Monetary legitimacy is the acceptance of a form of money as valid for economic transactions. The article suggests legitimacy emerges through participation in infrastructure rather than design principles alone.

_Financial Regulation_

Financial regulation consists of laws and supervisory practices governing financial institutions and monetary instruments. Regulation is treated in the article as a shaping constraint, not a normative judgment.

_Bitcoin Community_

The Bitcoin community is a loosely connected set of participants including developers, miners, businesses, and users. The article emphasizes fragmentation within this group rather than treating it as a single coordinated actor.

_Fragmented Responsibility_

Fragmented responsibility describes a condition in which no single participant has authority or obligation to represent a system as a whole. The article identifies this as both a strength and a challenge for Bitcoin’s institutional engagement.

_Payment Rails_

Payment rails are the technical and organizational pathways through which payments are processed and settled. The article highlights that new payment rails are being built regardless of Bitcoin’s participation.

_Medium-of-Exchange Gap_

The medium-of-exchange gap refers to the disparity between Bitcoin’s success as a store of value and its limited role in institutional payment and settlement systems. This gap is the central diagnostic focus of the article.

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