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stacking since: #1034092
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @unboiled 21 Oct \ parent \ on: 💥 OIL & GAS GIANT SHELL IS NOW ACCEPTING BITCOIN IN SOUTH AFRICA bitcoin
This is via the MoneyBadger app. So if the garage has Scan to Pay or Zapper it will likely work.
I paid at Engine just the other day. Apparently many Total and some Sasol garages support it too, but I haven't tried them yet. BP seems to be the odd one out, haven't heard of anyone having success there yet.
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.
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.
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.
even South Africa have more
It gets even better: Thousands more missing from that map in South Africa. Not sure why, but btcmap shows pretty much only Pick 'n Pay but very few others.
MoneyBadger, the same people behind CryptoQR which powered paying at Pick 'n Pay to begin with, have their own map showing a more complete list of merchants.
I think it's lazy to claim the perverse incentive is due to the existence of the reserve alone.
I'd pin it on the decision made to exclude just about any way to fund it that does not involve stealing from criminals and/or their victims where those can be identified.
The on-site chatbots are truly awful and seem to still run on inferior and outdated models
Yep, I have the same impression. But many places do have humans answering if you poke the bot to get one, so I've had some success before.
For someone like me, who tries the help section first, these types of bots hardly ever tell me an option I haven't tried before.
In two (ie. all) cases, it was a resounding no. The bots just regurgitated what the help section already said and in both cases didn't solve my issue.
One bot eventually offered to let me speak to a human. I gave up waiting for a real person to show up.
In the other case, I was able to get an actually working answer by emailing the support address. Interestingly, I had to dig it out of some 3rd/4th level page on their site. I couldn't get the bot to give me that address, either.
"Customary tributes and dues paid by vassals" sounds a bit like taxes to me, just at a different level.
From what I gather as I'm reading through The Sovereign Individual, there are key differences worth considering.
For one, vassals had their own armies from which they provided numbers when the king called on them. The kings' own armies, ie. with direct fealty to them, wouldn't necessarily outnumber those of their vassals combined.
This leads to the second factor, that their vassals could (and did) work together to keep the tributes and dues in check. Together they often could field a force that would make a ruler think twice in trying to enforce new/higher tributes.
In essence, vassals had more bargaining power over how much they'd pay than a citizen has today.
The main difference therefore when comparing to governments today is someone else (other voters and/or government officials) decide how much someone else (you) have to pay in new taxes whereas vassals struck bargains directly on how much they would be required to pay.
It's impressive you are able to pay utility bills with sats. What service are you using?
We're spending roughly half of the year in South Africa. For our home here, we have a prepaid water & electricity system. We buy vouchers at just about any grocery store and get a pin code to type into our meters.
Pick'n'Pay (3rd largest supermarket chain here) started accepting sats a bit over a year ago. So we buy a lot of stuff there and pay via lightning directly.
They also have liquor stores, some household items and even clothing stores under the same brand, in all of which you can pay via lightning too.
Granted, their products often aren't the best in terms of quality, but for basics it does the job just fine.
And finally, for some other things like phone data, Bitrefill has many vouchers on offer for SA.
I assume milk is bought p2p
Same as above: bought at Pick'n'Pay. Would love to unearth a p2p fresh milk vendor, but haven't found one yet. Still need to work more on our local network here.
Look forward to seeing how this index values decrease over time
Absolutely! I've been tracking it mentally for a while now, and the deflation is real. But I thought I might as well track it properly with a few staples that I know we'll continue to buy for years to come.
It's different to kinda know you're living a deflationary lifestyle when compared to being able to pull up a sheet with items and their associated costs in sats over time from which I can visualize it in more powerful ways.
It also feels more real to track actual purchases than just retro-fitting conversions from old fiat prices even if that leads to the same results.
Just the other day, I started tracking a few of the more regular BTC purchases to better visualize how, over the long term, we get a deflationary lifestyle out of using sats.
Might as well share this week's stuff here.
Lightning directly:
Electricity 148 kWh @ 165 sats/kWh
Water 3.4 kL @ 4303 sats/kL
Milk (long life) 6 L @ 799 sats/L
via Bitrefill:
Phone data 4.5 GB @ 5832 sats/GB
We also bought other groceries via Lightning as we currently do just about every week.
The sats spent have "matured since 2023." Or in plain English: we bought them back then. So we got a nominal discount of around 73% compared to our reference fiat (EUR).
(Nominal discount meaning the fiat hasn't been adjusted for inflation since 2023 because... I can't be bothered using fake inflation numbers, using an adjusted basket of goods just to make them look better, to then arrive at a somewhat-smaller-but-still-impressive percentage.)
Via Bitrefill. Buying prepaid data or call credits for a local South African carrier.
Once the sats have been sent, it gets applied instantly.
We buy some base amount every other month and sporadically add some more if we expect higher than normal usage.
This week, I bought some additional prepaid mobile data for my wife and I before leaving on an extended weekend trip with questionable wifi availability in the places we're staying at.
No killer deal, just business as usual.
The title needs a correction. You didn't lock it. You gave up your control of your sats to someone else to apply a conditional lock. And all you got in return is a pinky promise that you'll get it back.
And make no mistake, that BTC is no longer yours. You have been given a claim on it, enforceable to the extent that there will be something left to have it enforced on, but nothing more.
Seems likely that ai content is going to dilute the value per user at most platforms.
I don't know about that. Aren't advertisers paying for eyes or clicks?
If that's case and AI content manages to produce more of those, I don't see how it would necessarily dilute it.
I wonder what the story is with Meta.
My completely unfounded theory is the people I know who still use fb have a massive overlap with those who don't know how to or just don't care to use adblockers.
THAT'S why developers/CORE/others are so skeptical of filters.
That's fine and all, but the bad look comes from core removing the option for a node runner to even set that for themselves. They just don't care about what many node runners want. And if those are switching to get that option back, they can't pull a surprised pikachu face. (Though I doubt they are.)
It also feels like a storm in a tea cup to me. Claims of core being captured seem way overblown and too sensationalist for me to take them seriously without hard proof.
Are they acting elitist? Maybe. Let them. If that bothers you, run knots. Just beware of not letting your ego alone dictate your choice.
Meanwhile, little has changed. If a node runner wants to block stuff from their mempool, they can. If a spammer wants to include stuff, they can. Either option got a bit easier.
Fee estimation is still hard. Big woop.
The education isn't there. The 'general public' has heard of bitcoin... but do they know how it works or how to spend it? No. They have no idea.
People didn't know how an economy works before spending fiat money. They did so because others around them did.
My stance is that we can do the same with bitcoin. Getting started is not as hard as we make it out to be.
Even the 'finance' people who write articles or critique Bitcoin and know it exists have no idea how to use it. They never mention lightning or sites like stacker news.
I think the people you are referring to are writing it with a very specific goal in mind: to discredit bitcoin.
As for their reasons to do so, I can only hazard a few guesses. Frequently, taking that stance will buy them social credit in the circles they've invested their career in. They're not writing for everyone, they're writing to be seen by their superiors who can help them get their next promotion.
The level of knowledge among stackers is extremely niche
It feels that way, but I am not so sure. There is more curiosity in the 'general population' out there than I would have thought.
The level of openly showing you're in favor of bitcoin is niche, but more and more people seem to get that there is something going on, and it's not matching the narrative of the anti-bitcoiners.
Part of it, I think, is a lot of bitcoiners are private about it to protect themselves not only from wrench attacks, but also from social ostracization.
But the encouraging bit is how many of my non-bitcoiner friends (the vast majority) are starting to understand that the anti-bitcoin narratives are exactly that: just a narrative spun to make it look bad for the environment, social cohesion, or what have you.
In my opinion, non-stackers were just fed the lies first before they got around to find out more about it from a neutral place. It needs time for the lies to expose themselves.
What also helps is having a trusted friend to tell them to take a second look; it isn't what they have been told it is.
Would your stance change if the car dealer accepted bitcoin? And what if they were likely to keep the bitcoin to spend it themselves? What if your buying with btc made them consider the option to keep more on their books in future?
The need vs want consideration may get a new dimension depending on your answers to the above questions.
Ignoring the btc adoption considerations, it's a pretty straight forward process for me: Will spending the money on a toy hurt my future self's finances? And will I get more joy out of it today than in x years where I can get the same (or better) for less?
Now, if I were to drive adoption with my purchase, it would carry some degree of utility forward in time even though the object I am buying has little to none.
We need more adoption and a stronger circular btc economy today, not in 30 years.