BackgroundBackground
Every single time I have tried to orange pill my normie friends, there’s the question “but how can I use it?” and honestly there isn’t a good answer to this yet. Saying that some fringe websites and a coffee shop accept it doesn’t make any difference, one could even say that it reinforces their argument that it’s pretty much useless. So tackling this issue is imho one of the most important things going on in the space. Square’s announcement last year was one of the best news in years and makes me extremely bullish for the future, this is how we win. Dorsey is one of my last heroes that bitcoin hasn’t slain.
I had a dream… to build a company that could emulate Square here in Colombia, but once you start on that path there are huge barriers with registration, banks, compliance and many other things non related to the product/service you’re trying to bring to the market. Not to mention the anti bitcoin position you’re in when you have to KYC clients just because they want to use magic internet money.
But I thought it was worthy and I built an LN node, I found some devs to get a website for that, and I was on the edge of getting all the compliance BS ready, I didn’t want to operate outside the law. Then I saw this tweet by @Calle #1414366 and it really hit. I always thought that wouldn’t be possible because of some time constraints, but as they’ve shown, if you don’t need instant payment, there could be a market between BTC P2P buyers and users that want to pay with LN on retail shops.
PaymentsPayments
The QR payments are ubiquitous here, when it comes to small shops, bars and restaurants, everyone has it. This is how cash is disappearing. Transaction costs are zero and everyone can have their own QR by just clicking something on their bank app, individuals and companies alike. All the infrastructure exists, so there shouldn’t be any more to build than the railways from users to BTC buyers. Moreover these type of payments are displacing debit and credit cards, it's just cheaper and simpler to operate.
FOSSFOSS
As I understand @gandlaf21 is working on Openpleb which is a FOSS project for this, but the code on git seems to be a little quiet lately. There’s also what @plebqr is doing in Thailand and apparently it works pretty well there but the code is closed, not sure if the former is working with/for the latter…
I’d REALLY like to have this here in Colombia, it would open the door to thousands of shops that use it! I believe the best way would be to leave it open source, just as the lnp2pbot exists today and different devs contribute to it.
My dev skills are beyond “Hello world” but way below to undertake this project, so I would like to gather a team to build this.
What I can offer:What I can offer:
- My LN node that is well connected
- Funding… up to my possibilities, or manage to find what's required from other sources
- Market depth to kickstart the project while more participants come. A buyer of last resort
- Everything local, I know the community here and would be able to promote among local bitcoiners, no need to talk to any merchant, no permits, no registration
- Write docs and teach newbs how to use it
If you think you have the skills to dev this project, please contact me, I’m open to propositions and willing to make this work.
My mail / lnurl is admin@bit2cash.net
All good for more adoption.
But going to use an intermediary that manage those QR codes put the whole movement in danger.
One day the payment provider will just stop providing, for various reasons...
Perhaps it can be done like with Robosats, or lower-level, bonded 2-of-2?
I am more for merchant education and each one implement his own way (node/server) to accept BTC.
Nowadays, even with a damn mobile app you can start accepting BTC without any intermediary.
But yeah that REQUIRE merchant education, employee education and training etc.
This is a very important thing and we will never have any real adoption without good education. Fancy UI and intermediaries will only make things worse and people even dumber.
I am fucking tired of dumb people in this world.
Just read here what happen when merchants use a centralized payment processor: #1425210
THEY GET REKT
In the end, I think that all an agnostic countertop terminal needs is an lnaddr in secure memory and a state poller. Can build this into an ESP8266.
Edit: re: payment processor. Yes. It's shiny until the rug.
Opago and Lnbits did this in a very simple manner with those offline POS devices
Thanks @DarthCoin! :)
you guys should do a massive campaign in Colombia as you did in Germany / Austria.
Problem solved.
Most people I know are simply not interested in bitcoin, they're not, that's it, merchants included. Orange pilling normies is a laudable task and I respect and admire those who try, I've done it myself but with pretty limited results.
This method with QR payments doesn't involve orange pilling anyone, it's for bitcoiners who want to use their BTC in day to day life, that's the target. As it's P2P, intermediation is the same as in lnp2pbot or Robosats, it can always escape censorship e.g Tor
boycott all those that are not interested in bitcoin.
Better support those that are interested.
Why do you have to waste your valuable sats with those that are giving the sats instantly to saylors and blackrocks ?
The whole point is to spend wisely your sats, not everywhere on anything...
Check out what MoneyBadger is doing in South Africa. They're integrating with existing QR payment systems, so they can be paid with lightning wallets. It works like a charm.
Get in contact with them, they're very approachable.
Carel van Wyk explains their approach on a high level in this chat with Bitcoin Beach
Yes, until it doesn't and/or get banned. Is still a PAYMENT PROCESSOR, the most important thing that we've tried to eliminate with Bitcoin. Yet we are going back to the same shit.
Reminder: Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
How many times bitcoiners forget WHY THE FUCK we are in Bitcoin in the first place?
We are not here to get rich, we are here to FUCK BANKS, GOVS AND INTERMEDIARIES.
We are here to build a total parallel system that cannot be shut down.
The question was how to leverage existing QR payment systems. I answered that. No more, no less.
I don't think I've said that's the perfect end state.
Your own LN wallet. That's it. No system, no intermediaries.
Moneybadger is not fixing anything, just make people more dumber.
Thhe merchant don't even know they accept BTC - and that is wrooooong!
From the post:
I answered this part.
Not this question: "How do I orange pill the entire population before anyone dares to use BTC?"
You're welcome to answer that one as you're certainly best qualified among the two of us.
That refers to existing fiat banking infrastructure.
The moment you mix fiat rails with BTC, you will have the perfect recipe for getting rekt.
Bitcoin MUST be separate from fiat.
People that use money badger for payments are always defaulting back to p2p when it’s available. At the end of the day, you gotta eat. It’s not plan A, but it makes it possible to live without touching a single war token.
The problem is not with the ones that want to spend but with the ones that accept these intermediary QR codes without even knowing what they are using.
The merchant that knows what is doing and say: "OK I will accept this intermediary QR code, but later I will withdraw the sats into my own BTC wallet" are OK too and understandable that are forced to use an intermediary.
But how many of them opt out for sats and not fiat instant conversion, or even know what is behind?
So we are back to education needed. Instead of wasting time with these intermediaries, better just teach them to take directly sats.
Yup, I can corroborate this comment. We used money badger all the time when we were there. It’s exactly what you’re describing in this post and ridiculously easy to use.
It’s not as smooth paying experience compared to tap-and-pay.
I have stopped demonstrating to normies how “fast and smooth” Bitcoin Lightning payments are. They’re tapping their phone at the terminal and laughing at me or the merchants fumbling with the QR codes.
I think that there are ways to work with Apple nowadays to get around their NFC restrictions, which has for almost a decade been the primary reason to not do custom ISO-14443/18092 implementations and instead lift off of EMV.
In the past, developing a (rights-free!) broad standard on top of that would take ~18 months - I know because I've done it, more than once. I think that today, this can be done in half of the time because a PoC phase can be done very rapidly if the design phase is done right. Because you can get an NFC reader + controller for 30k-40k sats today, it means that over a timeframe of 3 years, we can go from zero to deployment anywhere: all the hardware exists.
The main obstacles:
True. KYC kills the whole purpose. Bitcoin. Bitcoin it is for anyone willing.
More reasons why this is a great a idea #1425210
You don't need to interact with payment processors, you just send a clear pic of the QR code to the buyer with the corresponding amount of sats and he sends you back payment receipt, ANYONE can pay QR codes.
Good
PlebQR is the one doing it right, because is P2P. Not sure how the founder got access to the banking APIs but it is doing it right. Openpleb seems following the same approach, hard path when opensource, meanwhile MoneyBadger is a business keeping the sats and paying back merchants with fiat.
The issue I see is this type of tools is that, to play as intermediary, one need to have access to the QRcodes issuer database via APIs, wheter is a business or a govt bank, consequently the majority are closed and requires B2B agreement to allow an external integration with any bitcoin tool.
Not sure how you gonna do it, but I look forward to see such tools in Colombia
QR codes solves a lot of issues.