Block’s bitcoin checkout goes live in Vegas, a significant step in making it ‘everyday money’
A Square-powered bitcoin checkout is now live on the Vegas Strip, where Bitcoin 2025 attendees can scan and pay for merch in seconds using the Lightning Network.
Miles Suter
LAS VEGAS — Jack Dorsey’s latest bitcoin vision is hitting the checkout counter — starting with a merch truck parked just off the casino floor inside The Venetian.
This week at Bitcoin 2025, Square is piloting real-time bitcoin payments, letting attendees scan and spend crypto for T-shirts, hoodies, and hats at the BTC Inc. pop-up store. The system runs on Lightning, which settles transactions off the main blockchain and is faster and cheaper than traditional processing methods.
When customers scan the QR code at checkout, Square handles things behind the scenes, including real-time exchange rates and confirmation.
The Tuesday launch marks the public debut of Block‘s most ambitious move yet to make bitcoin “everyday money” — a pilot that’s expected to expand from the Vegas Strip to millions of merchants around the world.
Behind it all is Miles Suter, a longtime product leader at Block, who flew in early to oversee setup with his team.
Miles Suter, Bitcoin Product Lead at Block, helped oversee setup of the new Square bitcoin checkout — a pilot he calls a “significant milestone” in making bitcoin more accessible and usable.
Miles Suter
Suter joined the company in 2017, when Cash App’s bitcoin integration was still a hackweek experiment.
“They needed someone with deep familiarity with bitcoin and the community,” he said, calling himself “an early evangelist.”
Eight years later, he’s helping “connect the Blocks” — working across Cash App, Spiral, Bitkey, and Square to embed bitcoin into every layer of the company’s ecosystem. The Square rollout, he says, is a natural next step.
Block expects to begin offering bitcoin payments to eligible Square sellers later this year, with full availability targeted for 2026, pending regulatory approval.
The launch comes as bitcoin trades near all-time highs, a surge driven largely by the “digital gold” narrative that positions it as a long-term store of value rather than a day-to-day medium of exchange.
At the same time, stablecoin legislation is advancing in Congress, and more fintech giants are aligning behind tokenized dollars.
Block is taking a different path — one that centers on bitcoin.
Suter said the company’s strategy is rooted in the belief that a decentralized, permissionless currency remains critical to the future of the internet — and that bitcoin is still the best candidate to fill that role.
Asked about the lingering perception that bitcoin is better suited for holding than spending, Suter pointed to a familiar pattern. When Cash App first introduced bitcoin trading, he said, it was met with hesitation and doubt.
“But again, somebody’s got to be first,” he said. “And we feel like we have the right DNA to push things forward.”
Inside The Venetian, Block is testing real-time bitcoin payments at the BTC Inc. pop-up store — the company’s boldest move yet to bring the digital asset to everyday retail.
Miles Suter
He called the new Square rollout “a really significant milestone” in Block’s broader mission to make bitcoin more accessible and usable.
The product builds on Square’s “Bitcoin Conversions” tool, launched last year, which lets merchants automatically convert a portion of their daily sales into bitcoin. Block says it has rolled out the feature to more than 1,000 sellers so far — and those who opted in have seen their bitcoin holdings grow by roughly 70% over the past year.
This latest feature goes a step further, enabling sellers to accept bitcoin directly at the point of sale.
For businesses that don’t want to hold bitcoin, there’s no exposure risk. Payments can be instantly converted to dollars.
“If you just want to have it as another payment method — like Amex, MasterCard, or Visa — bitcoin is now potentially another option for you,” Suter said.
For those that do want to hold it, Block is building out what Suter calls a “Bitcoin for Business” stack — a full suite of tools to accept, convert, manage, and self-custody bitcoin.
“If you do want to accept it as bitcoin,” he said, “we give you a full suite of products to manage that as you see fit. That means being able to convert your daily sales, buy and sell from your U.S. dollar balance into bitcoin, and withdraw to self-custody at any time. It’s about giving our merchants more options and making sure they never miss a sale.”
Jack Dorsey’s Block is piloting bitcoin payments at Bitcoin 2025, turning a merch truck into a live Lightning-enabled checkout experience.
Miles Suter
The announcement comes amid renewed attention on corporate bitcoin strategy, as some publicly traded firms adopt the cryptocurrency as a treasury reserve asset. But Block is targeting a different segment of the market.
“There’s a lot of talk about corporate bitcoin right now,” Suter said. “But like we did on Cash App — which is very much about the little guy and bringing accessibility to everyone — we want small and medium-sized merchants to also be able to get the benefits of bitcoin.”
While Block hasn’t released specific metrics yet, Suter said merchants who participated in the Bitcoin Conversions pilot have all profited. “Every single seller is in the money and has made money based on converting a certain percentage of their daily sales,” he said.
Square’s bitcoin push joins a broader ecosystem at Block that includes Bitkey, its self-custody wallet; Proto, a line of bitcoin mining hardware and software; Spiral, its open-source development arm; and Cash App’s bitcoin trading functionality.
“We’re focused on making bitcoin everyday currency,” Suter said. “We believe that the internet needs a native currency, and that’s where all our focus has been today.”
Environment
Tesla (TSLA) releases Q3 2025 financial results: earnings decline despite record revenue
Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the third quarter (Q4) 2025 after market close today.
We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.
Tesla Q3 2025 earnings expectations
As we reported in our Tesla Q3 2025 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $26.457 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.55 per share.
It would represent a record quarter in terms of revenue, thanks to record deliveries due to demand being pulled forward into Q3 in the US, amid the end of the federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
However, the expectations suggest that Tesla’s earnings are continuing to erode despite the positive temporary circumstances of the third quarter.
How did Tesla do compared to expectations?
Tesla Q3 2025 financial results
After the market closed today, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter and confirmed that it delivered below expectations with earnings of $0.50 per share (non-GAAP), and it exceeded revenue expectations with $28,095 billion during the last quarter.
This is quite disappointing, considering Tesla’s operating income decreased by 40% year-over-year, despite achieving record revenue.
The difference is accounted for by a decrease in gross margin from 19.8% to 18%. In part due to Tesla losing some regulatory credits and lowering prices across most products.
Bulls also can’t explain this by Tesla investing in the future, as capex is significantly down year-over-year.
Nonetheless, the automaker added to its war chest, which now sits at $41.6 billion.
We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):
Here’s Tesla’s Q3 2025 shareholder presentation in full:
Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q3 2025 results:
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Jeep and Ram’s parent company, Stellantis, is pushing back two more electric vehicles that were due out next year. The delay is the latest in a series of delays or plans to cancel what were considered key EVs.
Stellantis delays Alfa Romeo Giulia and Stelvio EVs
Add it to the growing list of electric vehicles that have recently been delayed or cancelled altogether. The current gas-powered Alfa Romeo Giulia and Stelvio will live on for at least another year in the US.
Initial plans called for both to arrive as next-gen variants in 2026, offered exclusively with electric powertrains. Stellantis is now delaying the EV versions for another year and will continue selling the current models until Alfa Romeo is ready to adopt the STLA Large platform.
Stellantis CEO Santo Ficili announced the news during a presentation for the updated Tonale SUV, according to a report from Motor1.
The Giulia and Stelvio have been on sale in the US for a decade now and are still based on the same Giorgio platform they arrived with.
Stellantis is delaying the EV variants to give Alfa Romeo more time to fit the next-gen Giulia and Stelvio on the STLA Large platform with gas engines. Although it’s not confirmed, the replacements will likely use the same twin-turbo inline-six “Hurricane” as the Dodge Charger Sixpack.
The announcement follows Stellantis’ decision to cancel Ram’s first electric pickup, the Ram 1500 REV. Instead, Ram will focus on the range-extended version.
Stellantis also cut the base R/T trim from the Dodge Charger EV lineup and reportedly shelved plans for a range-topping SRT Banshee model.
Ram and Jeep plan to bring back the HEMI engine for the Ram 1500 and Wrangler Rubicon 392, while the 2026 Dodge Durango will be exclusively available with a HEMI.
While Stellantis is shifting plans, at least one EV is still on track. Jeep’s CEO Bob Broderdorf confirmed the Recon EV, its “Wrangler-inspired” electric off-roader, will debut soon with sales starting next Spring.
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Tesla has released its latest Autopilot safety report, and the limitations are still presented misleadingly; however, one clear thing is that the data is worsening.
Tesla notoriously doesn’t release any relevant data to prove the safety of its ADAS systems: Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
The only thing the automaker releases is its quarterly “Autopilot safety reports”, which consist of Tesla releasing the miles driven between crashes for Tesla vehicles with Autopilot features turned on, and comparing that with the miles driven by vehicles with Autopilot technology with the features not turned on, as well as the US average mileage between crashes.
There are three major problems with these reports:
- Methodology is self‑reported. Tesla counts only crashes that trigger an airbag or restraint; minor bumps are excluded, and raw crash counts or VMT are not disclosed.
- Road type bias. Autopilot is mainly used on limited‑access highways—already the safest roads—while the federal baseline blends all road classes. Meaning there are more crashes per mile on city streets than highways.
- Driver mix & fleet age. Tesla drivers skew newer‑vehicle, higher‑income, and tech‑enthusiast; these demographics typically crash less.
With all these flaws in Tesla’s quarterly Autopilot safety reports, the primary value lies in comparing the miles between crashes with Autopilot features turned on over time.
As we previously reported, even this remains problematic, as Tesla stopped reporting the data for over a year. When it resumed reporting last year, it edited the previously released data.
However, there are reasons to believe Tesla’s data now, as it doesn’t look good for the company.
Here’s Tesla’s latest report for Q3 2025:
In the 3rd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 6.36 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded one crash for every 993,000 miles driven. By comparison, the most recent data available from NHTSA and FHWA (from 2023) shows that in the United States there was an automobile crash approximately every 702,000 miles.
It’s now the third quarter in a row where Tesla had a year-over-year decline in mileage between crashes:
The data deteriorated enough that Tesla had to give up its misleading claim that “Autopilot is safer than human by 10x” and now says “9x” instead:
The comment is still misleading for the previously mentioned reasons and should be labeled as “Autopilot + human driver” as it requires driver attention at all times.
There’s no way to know how many accidents human drivers prevented during Autopilot mileage.
Electrek’s Take
Again, I have to emphasize that this report only has value when you compare the Autopilot mileage against itself over time.
It’s also important to compare the same periods year-over-year as accidents are more common during the winter due to people driving more often after dark and in more difficult conditions.
Therefore, the only important thing that this report highlights is that Autopilot is getting worse.
Shouldn’t that be worrying? Shouldn’t Tesla address that instead of falsely claiming it means Autopilot is 10x, 9x safer than humans?
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