Today was my turn trying to pay with bitcoin at a Square merchant.
We ordered take out from a restaurant near us. I knew they used Square but we haven't eaten there since the bitcoin rollout. The online payment options didn't have bitcoin but I figured I could still ask about it when I went in to pick up our food.
There was no line, so I asked the cashier if anyone has paid in bitcoin yet. She said no and hadn't heard of that being an option. I told her that Square had supposedly enabled it on all their terminals.
This is a place we've eaten a bunch of times, so this was a friendly chat and I was just coming at it as someone who was curious about the situation. I asked her if we could try to figure out if it was an option and I'd buy a dessert if we found it. After we scrolled through the payment options (of which their are a bunch) looking for it, she told me the owner hasn't updated the system in a long time.
It was a little disappointing but I'll ask again next time and make the same offer of buying some pie or whatever if they can turn it on. The interaction was much less awkward than I expected (really not at all awkward). I think the curiosity angle will work well for me in the future.
I see posts like this, and I believe it’s far easier for people to use Zaprite instead.
I always advocate to business owners to use Zaprite because of its modularity with other payment options.
Also it’s just a website PoS they bring up not an entire app.
That way they can use it with any existing payment options they might have.
That's an interesting thought. I'm guessing, from my conversation with the employee, that using a new thing will be a much harder sell to this owner than updating the thing he's already using. Baby steps.
But not really cause it’s just a conversation with a business owner and your having conversation with a customer service person who just wants to move onto the next person in line.
It’s the equivalent of a person coming to a Bitcoin business and asking them to take dollars instead of bitcoin.
Most people in that business will not know why that business does not take dollars outside the owner.
They can guess but it’s better if they just talk to the owner to convince them to take dollars.
Except that she did know why it wasn't enabled. The owner is always very slow to install updates and/or upgrade their systems. It's just not an aspect of the business that he cares about.
Take one step further and talk to the guy.
That was actually the plan but he was heading out right when I got there.
There was no next person in line and I'm a regular who they don't mind talking to.
Great it sounds like they would hear you out on this Bitcoin thing.
Plenty of people advertising for things that people don't need... Overpriced shoes, fragrances, socks... "Collectibles"... " NFTs" (they're finally dead right?)
Very little advertising for things that actually benefit the people who buy them, as opposed to the companies who sell them. Spending bitcoin doesn't result in more advertising revenue, it doesn't bring more people to the 'crypto casino' to make exchanges the 'trading revenues'...
It doesn't make the ETF managers admin fees or a percentage... It doesn't help this credit card companies, it doesn't enrich the banks, it's not necessarily conducive to government spending (or lower bond yields...)
It's not particularly good for financial surveillance (or doesn't have to be) and bitcoin is highly, highly anti-leverage and historically sniffs out over-leverage like a bloodhound.
Being a better 'bond trader' doesn't get you more bitcoin... Nor does having an existing tech monopoly because you can borrow forever (see AI stonks).
Bitcoin is neutral money and spending it upsets ALL the EXISTING power structures, that's why there is so much pushback/anti-bitcoin rhetoric from existing authorities that don't want to lose their 'moat.'
EVERYONE has heard of the spacex IPO (if they have any interest in finance) but almost noone hears of Lightning - a growing and materially credible transactional layer for neutral value on the internet.
I don't think that's an accident.
Just my 2 sats
Advertise hope that there is customers and sales that is all.
Unfortunately, we don't have this system here in Europe (yet).
This idea of Square payment terminal in the US is really interesting, having this multi-payment option for Visa, Mastercard, GPay, and overlaying Bitcoin Lightning on top of it.
It's definitely a feature that could, and i hope, accelerate hyperbitcoinization and get people interested in this currency, by showing them that they can actually pay for their coffee, lunch, clothes, or anything else in a physical store with digital currency.
Bitcoin is not a product, it's a technology. Products built upon bitcoin will be adopted, not bitcoin in itself (not directly by the masses). When stablecoins get built reliably upon bitcoin, it will be adopted by the public as any other product: out of convenience. The focus on bitcoin adoption out of evangelization is flawed. Evangelization serves a very specific purpose, which is to build the community, but that's it.
I can see that being the case globally, but we're already on a dollar standard so our alternative isn't stablecoins.
Americans looking for a better money will switch to bitcoin directly.
To me the solution will come in the form of an in-between. Something like the so-called "flatcoins". The adoption of bitcoin directly to me is a mathematical impossibility, because of The Paradox of Bitcoin Adoption.
I still don't see that as an insurmountable problem. Other currency transitions have been rocky for people but that didn't stop them from happening.
We already have some people taking salaries and paying for goods with bitcoin. There's no particular reason that group can't grow. In fact, given one group of people who are only willing to use bitcoin and another who have no ideological attachment to any particular currency, the trend will be more people using bitcoin.
That's the thing, it's not a matter of will. Advantageous transitions to other currencies have always been done to more stable currencies, not less. It's not the case with bitcoin. The reason such groups you mention can not scale is what's described in the paradox. The problem occurs precisely in the scaling phase. And it is insurmountable in that math can not be avoided. That's why the solution to the paradox of adoption will come in a form that's not bitcoin itself, but something that will be built upon it.
It seems like you're ignoring the possibility that the dollar becomes the more volatile currency once we get near mass adoption.
But that's what's described in the paradox: for that to happen, we have to get near mass adoption. And near mass adoption will happen when the dollar becomes the more volatile currency, which will happen once we get near mass adoption. You can't escape that chicken-before-the-egg paradox.
I just don't find anything compelling about this "paradox". Many major currencies have become volatile throughout history, without bitcoin existing. So, Bitcoin does not have to even be related to the volatility. It could simply be there, being less volatile than the failing currency.
The dollar has plenty of structural problems of its own for people to eventually lose trust in it. The outside option of bitcoin is just another straw on the camel's back.
Bitcoin's volatility comes down as more people use it for daily exchange, which is happening. The dollar's volatility goes up as it becomes increasingly clear to people that debt servicing is untenable. At some point, those two trendlines cross each other.
lovely.
Curiosity angle much less dispicable than the technobabbling, crypto bruh, lemme-offload-my-fake-millions
I wouldn’t spend my bitcoin at a Square merchant purely on principal.
Either they accept bitcoin, directly on chain and/or to your own lightning wallet or I don’t spend my stats with you.
Additionally, since Square is a KYC merchant, when you bitcoin with a offramp, you actually create even more valuable chain analysis data than when you just buy from A KYC platform.
This will never happen. People ie regular merchants need intermediaries to help them in order to get started.
What valuable 'chain analysis data' do you create with a lightning spend?
i disagree. we are never going to win if we become absolutists. let them make the first step.
We need a variety of tactics.
Without a minority of purists, there's literally no incentive for any business to do what most of us think is the right thing.
Without gradualists/pragmatists, the hurdle is too big and no one will even try to meet us partway.
Fair.
That's cool for you but my sats are for bitcoiners who actually take the time to accept the actual sats without the KYC services. P2P is important to me.
I will try to talk the owner into accepting the bitcoin and holding it, rather than have it converted to fiat.
Perhaps I can even do that for him when I help the cashier find the option next time.
I hear you. It's not ideal and I'm not sure it's much better than just paying fiat, in many cases.
Some of the pros are that it signals to the merchant that there are customers willing to pay with bitcoin, it increases awareness of bitcoin as money, and it can set the stage for more adoption.
Like I said, this is a business we go to somewhat regularly. I'm friendly with the owner and think there's potential for a recurring dialogue about this.
you did everything right
yes, find a way to talk to the owner directly. staff are not decision makers.
I usually say hi to the owner but he usually doesn't have time to chat because he also does most of the cooking. We're friendly enough that I'm pretty sure he'd hear me out.
try to arrange a meeting with the owner before the opening hours. then they can dedicate their full attention to you and you can answer their questions without time pressure.
Nice work. I've been meaning to go over to the US to try it out.
I think square terminals auto-update.
I am not in the US, so the Sq terminals with bitcoin payment options might be different from what I'm used to, but from the ones that I've used, the checkout screen (the one that prompts for your card, tap etc) has a little "back" button on the top left, which takes you to other settlement options. Here it is used for settling in cash, but I suspect that is where the bitcoin payment option would show. I think that's what @jasonb described before IIRC.
Keep at it.
We scrolled through the menu and sub-menus of other payment options. People have mentioned it being a little buried but I really think we would have found it if it were there.
on the chekout screen?
Edit: It might be that they have to enable on using their online dashboard, but I was pretty sure that I heard it was auto enabled.
I also heard it was auto enabled but that some merchants are behind on their updates.
These stories are really great. I figure if enough of us try to spend our sats, we'll eventually encounter a flow that is replicable across most Square terminals. Like we'll all learn the magic combination of menus and submenus that reliable produce a lightning invoice.
Or we will all just get used to asking to pay in sats. SN users will launch the next wave of adoption.
I am curious which other bitcoin communities care about this and are trying to get merchants to adopt it.
It seems like most of us are the first to ask about it and there aren't that many stackers.
There's @spiral's Bitcoin Merchant Community, but I haven't heard an update about it in a while.
I'm sure some of the other meetup groups have efforts to get out the spend, but I haven't heard about a particular initiative there.
I think the awkwardness is all about the presentation and how weird you make yourself out to be while asking
Probably. Something about asking what other customers have done and talking about what the machine can do was more comfortable than asking the cashier to do something for me.
I imagine everyone will have a different approach that they prefer.
I think it takes the pressure off the employee and onto the machine, which immediately makes it lower anxiety for the employee, I think
One of the gravest sins in my family is making yourself a burden on other people, so I had to find a way to do this without being a pain in the ass customer who needs special treatment.
I mean you are the customer right?
While you're right, I have worked on their side of the customer interaction and I don't want to make their day harder than it needs to be.
I knew I liked you
why weird?
He did it perfectly fine just asking about bitcoin payment option.
Is merchant fault not the customer.
I agree. I was saying that it could be awkward if you get weird about it, not that he was weird. I think he did a good job
That's interesting, and that's one of the reasons why sometimes big announcements can be misleading as they mask the real work that is required to educate merchants on this option. What square did was significantly important, but without the right education or even people doing like what you did where you were asking about it, it becomes another useless relic
I’ve tried paying with BTC at a few retailers with Square terminals now and haven’t been successful.
The employees checking me out at the register had no clue they can accept payment in bitcoin and when I tried to figure out how to do this with them on their machines it’s impossible to figure it out.
Def disappointing.
Seems the majority that have the necessary resources, they have less interest in champoining Bitcoin
The culture has been heavily compromised.
Don't give up! How about you tell us at the ~AGORA's weekly "Spending Sunday" appointment next time? It is a place to remind us to spend, or even better, spend and replace our sats.
Tell us about your buyings, your preferred merchants and businesses, and why not take the opportunity to thank one of the bitcoin P2P sellers around the world?
Better still, earn and spend
By the time they set up Bitcoin payment, your media empire will be up and running, thus making it the perfect timing for you to expend your sats
I haven't dealt with Square in years so I don't really know how it works anymore. Even if Square has pushed it as an option to merchants is it automatic or is it something the merchant needs to then enable?
I believe the latest update turned it on by default and the previous update made it an option that can be enabled.
The lady I was talking to was laughing about how slow the owner is to ever update anything, so he might be rocking with whatever software version his terminal shipped with.
My first ever Bitcoin purchase was a pizza on Bitcoin Pizza Day in 2023.
and as recently as today, my latest purchase in btc is a Silk Road logo cap and a t-shirt embroidered with the infinity over 21 million symbol on the chest. Looking fresh for summer !
Nope
well played! great move to approach this as someone who's curious, bonus points for being mindful of their time and the dessert offer. will be looking for the followup!
No, Because i am from India🇮🇳
They are trying to stop Bitcoin.
But they can't, because nobody can stop it or freeze it.
They keep trying and keep failing.