pull down to refresh

188 sats \ 6 replies \ @unboiled 19 Oct \ on: 🏷️ Hey it’s Spending Sunday! What Have You Bought with Bitcoin this Week? AGORA

This past week in South Africa:

  • Filled up our car at a gas station (called Engen),
  • Coffee & breakfast for both of us at Bootlegger, a cafe chain that started accepting BTC a while ago (I completely missed that until recently),
  • A Sprite at another supermarket chain (Checkers) just to see if their setup works (spoiler: it does),
  • Paid for parking at a mall close to the two places above. This one was fun in another way: Completely bypassed the ticket machine in 3 easy steps. 1) I scanned the bar code on the ticket, 2) sent sats, and 3) there was no third step.

Those were the interesting/new ones I can remember.

All of the above were powered by MoneyBadger's app which converts the merchants' existing QR codes into Lightning invoices and hands those over to your LN wallet for payment.

write
preview
21 sats \ 4 replies \ @AG 19 Oct

That's great! Thank you for sharing. This money badger app is really innovative, remind me of PlebQR #835356 in Thailand, that is p2p though.

It is making it easy to pay with sats, still merchants are continuing to get paid in fiat i assume, as money badger is playing as intermediary. A problem half solved is already great progress!

reply
0 sats \ 3 replies \ @unboiled 19 Oct
It is making it easy to pay with sats, still merchants are continuing to get paid in fiat i assume

I too strongly suspect many choose to get fiat. But it says it's the merchants' choice on MoneyBadger's site.

reply
0 sats \ 2 replies \ @AG 19 Oct

ok so merchants need to sign up to money badger too? that's even more interesting. I'll have a look

reply
21 sats \ 1 reply \ @unboiled 19 Oct

The merchants sign up with a QR code provider. MoneyBadger currently works with two of those providers by adding LN rails: Scan to Pay, and Zapper. (That is in addition to stores/chains that integrate in a more direct way like Pick 'n Pay, or Bootlegger.)

Those QR code providers play an important role in providing merchants a payment option which is open to the large number of unbanked South Africans. One of the key ones is the ability to spend mobile phone credits (called "air time") for goods. The phone credits can be bought with cash. That bridges the gap for the unbanked.

reply
21 sats \ 0 replies \ @AG 19 Oct

That's great, and is a great service. It should be open source, so others can easily replicate the model around.

reply
21 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 19 Oct

parking ticket with sats! Amazing

'muricans can't even imagine that, they are still using paper checks and ETFs LOL

reply