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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm John Lawrenson. Today, I'm in Europe's Bitcoin City.

So I experimented living only with Bitcoin in Lugano. Groceries are okay. Plenty of medical places, you can survive here in Bitcoin only.

By the side of a vast lake surrounded by vast mountains, the pretty prosperous town of Lugano

in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland has gone a long way to encourage the use of cryptocurrency alongside the Swiss franc.

You can even pay for municipal services in crypto in this city, your kids crash, for example,

or a parking fine.

Young people start with the cellular, with the phone, to have a count in Bitcoin, because

it will be like a tree are growing. In this tree will grow

very big in five, ten years. We look at this attempt to bring Bitcoin into people's

everyday money transactions and ask, is using this notoriously volatile currency a good

thing? And is this the future?

That's all coming up in business daily.

In what is the classiest McDonald's I've ever set foot in

by the lake in the centre of Lugano, a customer orders coffee.

The salesperson holds out what looks like a credit card payment terminal,

but which in fact is a special crypto one, distributed free to businesses by the town council.

The customer pays contact lists from the Bitcoin wallet on his telephone.

0.0-8629 Bitcoin it comes to.

Not many people who've bought Bitcoin will probably ever think about using it to buy actual things like a diamond ring or a pizza.

Bitcoin, this purely digital currency that uses encryption to control, manage and issue units

rather than relying on a central bank or a government, is something people more usually buy as

...