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I used my non custodial wallet today here in California... At a coffee shop with square and it worked.
So that's the good news.
The less good news is that I had to ask 3 other square merchants if they 'took bitcoin on their square terminal' and they didn't or couldn't find the bitcoin option.
But hey it worked beautifully and square uses blinded paths too so we are making progress.
Yeah what it looks like to me is that the underlying issue is that although the terminal is enabled for receiving Bitcoin, but the merchants aren't properly enabled to accept it.
To take this over the finish line, basic education is needed. Doesn't have to be a book, can be a flyer.
My understanding is that it should be enabled 'by default' regardless of opt in by the merchant... But I'm not sure the software is fully up to date on all terminals.
What surprised me is how nice the employees have been about it at least in California. They know of bitcoin even if that's the limit of their knowleege... They want to accept if its good for business. I told them I want to buy such and such but I want to pay in bitcoin via square.
Going out and using a lightning wallet in the wild is really cool, it opens totally new possibilities for medium of exchange.
The merchant will still need to understand how to operate it, I think. I was trying to figure out some Square things for a client earlier this year and the docs - across all the Block services tbh - can be a bit confusing and hard to navigate: they have hundreds of features.
Since a lot of merchants seem to be of the "don't know how" posture, maybe effort spent towards helping them understand are better spent at the moment than reporting how many millions of unused terminals are enabled to bitcoiners. Doesn't need to be Block-initiated even.
Key word:
enabled. That doesn't mean that it works, it means that it could work.s/optimism/skepticism/