75 sats \ 1 reply \ @The_Daniel 10 Apr \ parent \ on: The PubKey NYC AMA AMA
Our operations staff has been running the numbers and streamlined the menu. It wasn’t one of our best sellers. We’ve been getting creative and offering more specials. If there’s enough demand we could bring it back as a limited-time offer, kind of like the McRib.
We’ll be open at our normal time of 1 PM on Saturday 4/20 with some half-priced bitcoin-only specials starting at 4:20 PM.
Feel free to camp out on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Some people do that all the time.
Short answer is this is always top of mind as a business, especially one with a kitchen and bar, and that’s before you even think about the bitcoin stuff.
Need Thomas to take this one in more depth, but he just left to catch a flight so he might not see this for a while.
Thank you!
Before PubKey existed, there was another dive bar in this location called Formerly Crow's, and before that it was The Stoned Crow. Thomas used to run bitcoin meetups at what was then his neighborhood bar, somewhat embarrassingly called "Crypto at the Crow." When the pub closed down, Thomas and the other cofounders (Andrew and Jerk) partnered with the previous owner Marshall to reopen the bar as PubKey in 2022 after the NYC bitcoin scene (and the city at large) took a major hit during two years of Covid. Apart from BitDevs and other local meetups including Harlem Bitcoin, there wasn't much out there in the way of a purely bitcoin-focused gathering place. One of the best things about it is that it's still a neighborhood dive bar, and many people who come here don't even realize it's a bitcoin bar at first, because a lot of the bitcoin content fades into the background aesthetic and it's waiting to be discovered by those who look for it. Probably 60-70% of our regular customers are pre-coiners.
We also don't see SN as competition at all, because we're a physical space where people connect in the real world, something that even the best digital platforms can't reproduce.
It can be hard to explain how Lightning works to someone who is new to bitcoin, because it requires a basic understanding of how payment channels and UTXOs work. Customers who come from out-of-state with apps like Strike (not available in New York) have an easier time making Lightning payments, because they are getting something that's more of a Venmo-like experience.
To set up your own self-custodial Lightning wallet on something like Zeus or Phoenix, you have to have some bitcoin on-chain that you can use to open a channel. People get confused why they have to make an initial transaction to send or receive sats on Lightning. This is also why we host monthly Lightning meetups, because there is a lot of education to be done.
As much as people from New York like to crap on New Jersey, they don't have the BitLicense there. If we opened a bar a mile and a half west of our location in Jersey City, we could do a lot more bitcoin stuff.
It's pretty hard to get people to part with their sats even for deep discounts. Once the novelty of paying in bitcoin wears off, people usually go back to fiat so they can stack more.
Mike Novogratz was here in February, and we had Max and Stacy for an event last October. We're less than two years old and we'd love to get some bigger names on our speaker list in the year ahead.
We'd be very happy to host a presidential debate.
If we only accepted bitcoin we would not be in business. Our bar is equipped with a Lightning wallet to accept payments in sats, but that is completely optional and is only used by a small number of our patrons. Most prefer to HODL or don't have a Lightning wallet yet.
We also hosted an event with the Human Rights Foundation and CATO in February of this year to discuss their global CBDC Tracker website, during which we revealed that we were in possession of an American Flag that had been flown over the U.S. Capitol on December 18, 2023 for the 10th anniversary of the "I AM HODLING" meme. It was accompanied by an official certificate with Senator Elizabeth Warren's signature honoring Satoshi Nakamoto for providing economic freedoms to Americans.