Hey Stackers,

I found this place on BTC maps https://btcmap.org/map#19/38.29379/-76.49713
Which was cool because I had been checking around this area and this location was a new listing to me. I noticed it was posted on February 5th and was hoping that someone had posted it as a location they had found to spend their sats, but that wasn’t the case.

Before I get there though, allow me to describe blue wind Gourmet a bit. Right when you walk in, on the front counter near the POS you’re immediately put in front of a wide array of cookies and other baked goods. They make all their baked goods in house including their own chocolate. There’s a generous wine list, and many different beers. You’re able to build your own six pack of beer in a mix and match fashion, and In their seating area an entire wall is covered with bottles of wine for sale, pretty cool! Also on the menu they have a long list of breakfast and lunch items. Time to order and time for the question we should all be asking. I chose a Cabernet Sauvignon from Italy, the name escapes me unfortunately, and I asked the man behind the counter, do you accept bitcoin? Right away he told me know, they don’t do any crypto there. I showed him BTC maps and let him know that’s how I found this place to begin with, but he wasn’t having it, so I handed him cash for the transaction. As another lady behind the counter returned with my glass of wine I asked her if a manger or owner was here today. She said yes, she’s in a meeting, and would let her know I was asking. So I took my glass of wine and found an isolated table with a chair facing an open window and sat there. I normally like to take in a bit more of my surroundings and get some details to report but today I sat looking out the window sipping my wine and just let my mind wander. I thought of all the controversy and in-fighting within the community, I thought of Anita Poche and her efforts in Africa, and I thought of my own lack of effort in the creation of bitcoin circular economies and how difficult it can be here in the west.

Maybe 15 minutes later, the owner of Blue Wind Gourmet, Dana, came and said hi and I got right to it. I asked: do you accept bitcoin here? The immediate answer was no but what followed was best case scenario: curiosity. As some of you have experienced, asking someone if they accept bitcoin is often met with indifference or sometimes straight up hostility. Not with Dana. She sank a bit more into her chair, looked across the table to me, and told me she’d like to hear more. I was still a bit confused as to how her business ended up on BTCMaps if she wasn’t knowingly accepting sats, so we started there. Apparently, Feb 5th was the day she activated “accept bitcoin” on her square terminal, and they had auto populated her business to BTC maps. Pretty neat! She then brought out a tablet that had her square back end set up and we got to poke around together which was really cool for me because honestly, I’ve been a little confused and curious about how that all worked from the merchant side and now I got to see! A couple things to note here. First, no one had ever transacted with bitcoin yet, we saw, but what was strange was she had a sat balance. We aren’t sure if this was accidental or a default (which would be disingenuous of square) but there was a setting converting 5% of all her square USD invoices to sats. There weren’t many, but it was strange to see them. We poked around the POS a bit and together figured out the path to quickly present a lightning invoice to a customer. It was quick and easy and worked well. “I’ll have to train the boys how to do this for the food truck.” What a great thing to hear! There is a military base nearby and apparently they have a food truck with a contract there.

We talked about bitcoin for over an hour on that small table near the window. The best part about the entire conversation was Dana’s line of questioning. I was really delighted to be on the receiving end of her inquisitive questions. I wish I had a fraction of her insight when I first got into the space, years ago. We were able to cover the important stuff, and she was so interested in simply understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin. We discussed the Bitcoin network, bitcoin the currency, we covered how bitcoin is separate from everything else through its consensus mechanisms, we covered the path and requirements of on chain transactions, and I showed her a visualization of that with mempool.space, we talked about bitcoins issuance and finite-ism, we covered miners and their role in transactions and network security, and why their selfish activity is important, we covered the lightning network and its reason for and time of conception, channels and their relationship with the bitcoin time chain, we covered the basics and importance of self-custody, we covered seed phrases, private and public keys and public addresses, and lastly as my favorite proof of concept we sent some of my sats over to Juri and Kala over at https://lightningcats.io/ to get some more visuals and experience with just how easy sending sats over lightning really is, and I was then able to drive home the importance and wonder of what we were actually doing here: sending money across borders with no permission, account, or intermediary with instant final settlement. We really got a lot done in this one conversation. I really give the credit to Dana because it was her questions that guided me through most of this conversation. Because I had paid cash for my wine, I wanted to get something else and be her first customer to exchange sats for goods, and I went with a large oatmeal cookie, which I ate quickly on the car ride home. Delicious. She informed me that any bitcoin she receives through her terminal she will hold as sats and won’t convert to USD. I’ll be sending her resources to guide her and her business through the journey of learning how to safely use bitcoin and hopefully, with time, to self custody. Before leaving I told her I would send her some material for self learning. I’ll send her the white paper, and I will send this post to her and give a SN spiel and recommend posting in the @Bitcoin_beginner section. I think her questions would be very well received there. I'll send her Anita Poche work, but she said she likes audio books. I checked Anita’s book: Learning Bitcoin, which I think is nice for book number 1, but audio is not available. Does anyone have suggestions for audio books that focus a bit more on how bitcoin works rather than deep dives into the history of money and other fiat-bad narratives? Perhaps some podcasts? I’d love to hear them.

As I was driving home, dusting oatmeal raisin crumbs off my sweater and onto the floor, I gleefully reflected on the experience. I walked into a business today that didn’t know how to accept bitcoin even after activation in Square and I left with the owner wanting to already train her staff on the steps to doing so. Please, if you find yourself in the area, show Dana some love and come spend some sats at Blue Wind Gourmet. Great wine and beers, a wonderful looking breakfast menu, in house made chocolates and pastries, and great overall ambiance inside. Also, I encourage you to get in there and get your own hands dirty within your local areas. Sometimes all that’s necessary to peak a merchant's interest is one single inquiry from one of us. As the network grows, it grows.

All you have to do is ask
sats for all