I have used LN-BTC to purchase giftcards for some games I play and services I use. I've noticed you can even pay your phone bills or groceries by purchasing giftcards for those with your Bitcoins.
While I love online payments in that sense, how about a standard merchant accepting Bitcoin Lightning? I do recall Breez having a "Merchant Mode", but I don't know how practical it is, simply as I am not a merchant.
Is it just a concept that is yet to spring into (mainstream) action? I have heard about that one Burger place that accepts Bitcoin Lightning, but not much else in terms of retail mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin. I would love to see consumers be able to use their satoshis to refuel their car, shop for instant noodles at convenience stores, etc. Not have to pre-purchase (and then also use within the allocated time & not forget about it) a giftcard then walk to a store/order online.
I think it is... I've been looking into integrating with toast https://doc.toasttab.com/doc/devguide/apiCreatingAnOrderWithPaymentInformation.html They have a way to mark orders as paid so you really just need a way to show a lighting invoice qr code to the customer. Like you said they do this for self checkout at the burger place. I was thinking you could have some tablet or similar to allow them to pay and as soon as the invoice is paid the restaurants lighting node can mark the check paid via their api
The toast you linked to looks exactly like what you'd normally see in a kiosk. Seems like the technology is there, now need to see it be integrated.
Check: BTCpay server, LNbits (PoS extension), merchant app like SwissBitcoinPay and the Boltcard standard.
All of this exist and is happening today, maybe not near you but in Lugano Switzerland a lot of merchant accept Bitcoin Lightning (thus their system is not comptabile with contactless boltcards. Also in El Salvador, in some places, you can use Bitcoin. Their are many communities, check the map on btcmap.org and try paying at a merchant or get a boltcard and test yourself with breez or another compatible app.
Unfortunately, I live in a place where most people do not know what Bitcoin is, and the "educated" say it is a scam/not real money. Despite many bank closures & insane inflation recently haha.
Thank you for the information, since Bitcoin Lightning implementation is spreading to smaller places, I can only hope that by the remainder of the decade, we integrate LN- BTC here.
Please stop saying that, is wrong. Only shitcoienrs use that term, trying to give the impression that there's a different bitcoin than BTC. There's ONLY ONE Bitcoin.
Bitcoin over LN (Lightning Network) is just bitcoin, nothing else.
Bitcoin onchain = the vault, the long term holding, your bank
Bitcoin on LN = the payment network, your spending pockets, your daily spending.
Go to btcmap and you will find plenty of merchants that accept bitcoin around the world.
They are not spread uniformly across all geographies but some central european countries have more than others. Asia, as expected, is a laggard because of their authoritarian culture.
Yes, lightning is made for small retail transactions. The only things preventing faster adoption are merchants' own awareness. So we are still early.