Central Texas Gun Works: The First Gun Store in America to Take Bitcoin

Who is Michael Cargill, and why did a gun store take Bitcoin?

Michael Cargill is a twelve-year US Army veteran who opened Central Texas Gun Works in Austin in 2011, after an assault on his grandmother pushed him toward firearms education.^[12] By 2014 he was a Texas DPS-certified concealed-handgun instructor with eight years' standing and more than 7,000 students behind him, running a retail counter and a training school out of the South Bend Center on Ben White Boulevard.^[7]

His stated reasons for adopting Bitcoin were a merchant's reasons, not a maximalist's: lower processing costs than cards, no chargebacks, faster settlement, and less sensitive customer data to protect. “We hope by using this currency in Austin, it will help to generate new customers and attract more visibility for our business,” he said in the January 2014 announcement.^[1] The visibility part worked immediately. Cargill was on Fox News on January 29, two days after going live, and Forbes sent Andy Greenberg to the store within six weeks.^[3][4] This was the same season the Texas Department of Banking was drafting the memo that would say Bitcoin is not money – the seam the history of Bitcoin in Texas runs along. Cargill was operating on the merchant side of that seam before the state had drawn it.

What was the first Bitcoin gun sale?

The first transaction landed on February 4, 2014, and it is a small case study in what Bitcoin actually did for a retailer. The buyer had never visited the store. They found it through an online newsfeed, paid from a personal wallet, and completed the purchase remotely – the same path an online shopper takes anywhere, applied to a category most payment networks treated as radioactive.^[2] The store describes it as the first legal online firearm sale by Bitcoin in the United States. The gun still shipped to a licensed dealer for transfer and the buyer still cleared a federal background check. Bitcoin changed how the money moved, not how the firearm did.

Was buying a gun with Bitcoin anonymous?

No, and Cargill made a point of saying so. As Greenberg reported after visiting the shop, Cargill required the same Form 4473 paperwork and FBI background check of a Bitcoin customer as of anyone paying cash.^[4] The store was answering the obvious question of early 2014 – Silk Road had been seized only four months earlier – and the answer was that a licensed dealer is a licensed dealer regardless of the payment rail. NBC News made the same point at the end of March, noting that Cargill and TrackingPoint's Oren Schauble, whose Austin precision-rifle company had also begun taking Bitcoin, both ran checks on every sale, and that federal law does not care how a buyer pays.^[6]

Why did BitPay drop the store?

Roughly six weeks in, BitPay froze Central Texas Gun Works' account and cut it off, citing terms of service that prohibited firearms. Cargill said there was no warning and that BitPay had known his business model when he signed up.^[5] He tried several processors before landing on Coinvoice, which is what he was using by the time NBC reported the story on March 30.^[6]

This is the most instructive part of the episode. The store discovered in 2014 what the wider industry would spend the next decade learning: a Bitcoin payment processor is a company, with a compliance department and a bank, and it can drop a merchant exactly as Visa can. Bitcoin the network never refused Cargill a payment. An intermediary did. The pure peer-to-peer version – buyer's wallet to store's wallet, no processor – was available the whole time, and it is the rail the protocol was designed around.

What about the Bitcoin ATM?

On Sunday, March 2, 2014, the store hosted a Texas Independence Day event with State Rep. Larry Gonzales, live music, free t-shirts for the first 100 guests, and a donation drive for the Capital Area Food Bank. The centerpiece was a Robocoin Bitcoin ATM, installed in partnership with CoinVault ATM.^[7] Robocoin had switched on the first Bitcoin ATM in the United States ten days earlier at HandleBar on East 5th Street.^[8][9] For a stretch of early March 2014, both of America's Bitcoin ATMs sat inside Austin city limits – one in a bar, one in a gun store. That pairing says something true about the city's Bitcoin culture then, and about why the inaugural Texas Bitcoin Conference opened at Circuit of the Americas three days later.^[10] “Austin is quickly becoming a hub for new technology and innovative products,” Cargill said at the unveiling.^[7] He was early to that, too. The Austin builders who would give the city its intellectual center – the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, founded four months before – were writing their first essays in the same city the same spring.

The honest counterweight: the payment method was never the point

Gun-safety groups did not see the story the way the tech press did. Brian Malte of the Brady Campaign told NBC that Bitcoin was beside the point: the problem was the absence of a federal background-check requirement on private sales, which Texas does not mandate.^[6] That critique was about Texas gun law, not about Bitcoin, but the store's announcement gave it a fresh news hook, and it deserves to stand here in full. The BitPay episode also cuts both ways. Cargill was the aggrieved party, but BitPay was within its published terms, and a merchant who builds on a processor accepts the processor's rules. The lesson is about intermediaries, not villains.

Where did Michael Cargill go next?

Cargill ran for the Texas House in 2014 and lost. He sued the City of Austin in 2015 over its gun-free zone at City Hall and won in 2019.^[12] And on June 14, 2024 he was the named respondent in Garland v. Cargill, the 6–3 Supreme Court decision holding that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority when it classified bump stocks as machine guns.^[11] That trajectory is the reason this story belongs on TexasBitcoin. The man who put Bitcoin in a South Austin gun store in January 2014 went on to win one of the decade's defining Second Amendment cases. Texas Bitcoin history and Texas political history share more personnel than either side usually notices – the same pattern Greg Abbott and Bitcoin records from the other direction, with a gubernatorial campaign taking Bitcoin donations three months after Cargill's store did.

The store still accepts Bitcoin.^[13] As of September 2026 it is among the longest-running Bitcoin merchants in Texas, and the best-documented survivor of a grassroots era that the state would take another decade to catch up to – in the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and everything that followed.