Was told by my wife that we don't do anything fun and exciting on the weekends, so I suggested an adventure called "Dad's mystery drive" which involves everyone getting into the car and me driving around until I see something that looks "fun and exciting" enough. In this case it was a pumpkin patch.
This place had no prices listed anywhere, which is normally a red flag. However, upon approaching the guy manning the till, I noticed that he had a Square terminal. Prices be damned! We're gonna buy pumpkins with bitcoin!
After much debate about the relative merits of various sizes and shapes with regard to highly optimistic assessments of carving abilities, everyone picks out their pumpkins and brings them to the till. I inform the fellow that he has a Square terminal and that they accept bitcoin.
He seems interested and curious! He says he's heard the same and would love to see how it works. Now, I don't know if this is an older model or what, but it was the kind of terminal that only had a screen for the cashier. The customer is presented with a screenless nfc/card reader of sorts.
He taps around for a few minutes but it is clear that he isn't finding anything that says bitcoin. I suggest that it may be in his payment settings on the upper right. This prompts him to turn the screen to me. I feel optimistic!
It's all a bit of a blur now, but we spent a good five minutes tapping around in menus and trying to find something that looked like a bitcoin payments toggle. At this point, I was venturing deep into "not fun nor exciting" territory as far as the other members of the mystery drive were concerned.
I decide that we have gotten as far as we are going to get in this endeavor and offer to pay him cash, which he accepts with relief.
One of these days I'm gonna get it to work.
Square said at first that they "enabled bitcoin payments" and it ended up being a lie. Then they said "we enabled bitcoin payments for real this time, enabled by default, it just was not on by default last time" that ends up being false also.
I've been to MANY businesses that take Square, NONE OF THEM accept bitcoin, nor can it even be found anywhere in the menu on how to enable.
Every time I see a business with a square terminal I ask about paying in bitcoin and they have no clue what I'm talking about and there is no option to pay in bitcoin. Square is either poorly managed or they are just false advertising. Square is actually making bitcoin look bad by having people annoy business owners on paying in bitcoin then nobody being able to figure it out. It makes bitcoin look like a hassle when it actually isn't.
In the past week I've just given up on Square. Square is not the great thing I thought it was going to be for bitcoin adoption.
I share your frustration.
But I have a hypothesis. I would bet that the average Square merchant does not upgrade their app very often. They have to go to Apple's App Store and manually update.
I haven't seen the stats, but I bet most merchants simply don't have the latest version of the software.
In my experience, only square terminals that look like the one in the top left can accept bitcoin. You'll see the toggle in the top left as seen here:
Same one in use by a coffee business here, no btc toggle from view of customer or merchant
Since square announced they turned this on, I have seen a few that look like this without it enabled. Very approximate numbers, I'd say I've seen 10 that looked like this, and 7 showed the toggle. I've never seen any option to pay in bitcoin on terminals that don't look like this though. Not sure what determines when the toggle is visible or when it's not.
Yep same model as this one I saw
#1530248
This sound's like an ~AGORA post :)
I don't think it can be done by the terminal, because terminal is usually accessed by staff members. So you need to advise the merchant to do it from the website, logged in as admin. I remember someone posted the instructions here somewhere, let me find it (in less than then min?).
edit:
Found it! #1281385 it was a brochure. You can print some and leave it in the car.. just in case :)
Thanks for pulling this up! I read through the links, and as far as the pumpkin patch guy goes, I think this is the relevant step:
source
But I didn't see anything that said Banking. I suspect this is something he needed to do when logged in as admin or something.
Wow, that's a lot of kyc/aml stuff, not sure it can be done in 5min. One must have all info handy.
In the other side I don't see any step to set a bitcoin address or connect an hardware wallet. Is this still custodial service? Curious to know how then a merchant can cash out.
As far as I know, it is custodial. Square holds the bitcoin on behalf of the merchants. I'm pretty sure that's how they manage the customer-pays-bitcoin-merchant-receives-dollars. Perhaps if you have a CashApp account it is different, but I don't think so.
As a natural born level 2 helpdesk support watersack, these posts are now officially making my eye twitch.
It appears to me that you may have stumbled upon a business opportunity.
Easily favourite part of these posts is when the business owner is enthusiastic to learn how to accept Bitcoin.
I had a similar experience last week with a credit card payment. Old cashier + new POS system = technology issues abound!
I asked another cashier on another occasion if they accept bitcoin and they replied "I hope not, we barely know how to use the card reader!"
I hope people and businesses like Square learn from this... Bitcoin is (and always has been) shitty at in-person payments, so are credit cards, Apple Pay, etc. It took billions of investment to build the tech and POS and networks just to get to the point where an internet outage still breaks everything.
Cash is king when you're standing in front of the person you're trying to pay.
Bitcoin is king when you're trying to pay a computer server across the ocean.
Using the wrong tool for the job is just foolish.
Great points! there is a lot of infrastructure that has been built up to make card payments easy (I remember when card payments always involved a little anxiety as to whether the merchant would be able to figure it out).
Maybe we need more stories of paying for online stuff with bitcoin (I did just renew my domain name and paid with a onchain bitcoin via a swap, so that's cool!)
It seems like something Square should figure out with their UX. It's not your problem or merchant's. Maybe it would be more time efficient to just email this to Square customer support so that they could push some sort of an update. Or somehow reaching out to Jack (on X?) and saying that hyperbitcoinization is being delayed. Even if KYC is involved at least they could tell people: "go KYC yourself if you want bitcoin".
That sounds exactly like the experience I had at the restaurant near our house. Maybe he also hasn’t installed any software updates.
The pain continues
I'm still new to paying with bitcoin in real-world shops. When it failed, was the problem on the Lightning side, the Square terminal, or the merchant setup? I'm curious how seamless this is supposed to be for someone who just wants to scan and pay.
the failure was in displaying a lightning QR. When you can get it to display an invoice QR, it almost always works. This isn't a problem with lightning so much as the settings in the Square terminal.
Merchant setup, almost certainly. Square's bitcoin option isn't a toggle on the terminal itself — the merchant has to enable it in the Square Dashboard (web, admin side), and only then does the customer screen offer a bitcoin QR (a Lightning invoice). If it was never enabled upstream, no amount of menu-tapping on the device will surface it, which matches the story exactly.
Once the QR is actually presented, the Lightning side is usually the reliable part — fast and final. In the wild the failure mode is nearly always "nobody turned it on" or staff not knowing it exists. The plumbing works; the last mile of UX is where payments go to die. (Learned the adjacent lesson this week debugging a Lightning auth integration — the protocol was fine, the assumptions around it were the entire bug.)
the merchant being curious is the actual win. the family hovering with a cart full of pumpkins is the clock.
is "accepts bitcoin" on Square a merchant admin setting the cashier can't flip mid-sale, or can someone on the floor turn it on before the kids melt down?