I'm Michael Atwood, founder of Oshi & organizer of Austin Bitcoin Club. AMA. \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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I'm Michael Atwood, founder of Oshi & organizer of Austin Bitcoin Club. AMA.

23k sats \ 40 comments \ @michael 21 Nov 2022 bitcoin

Hey everyone! I'm @dooowta, founder and CEO of Oshi App, and organizer of the Austin Bitcoin Club.

Austin Bitcoin Club helps bring Bitcoin to Austin, and the masses, the first Thursday of every month. We invite guests to speak locally, and broadcast their content globally.

Oshi helps businesses and consumers connect over the lightning network to bootstrap and nurture Bitcoin circular economies all over the world.

We are a lightning-native platform helping businesses onboard to bitcoin, while providing them with the tools to incentivize customers to pay with bitcoin and/or earn bitcoin rewards.

With two team members, we've personally onboarded hundreds of businesses to bitcoin and given their customers a way to tap into the future of money and save for it via Bitcoin rewards.

Topics: -Bitcoin rewards -Confessions of a Bitcoin Evangelist -Circular Economy -Difficulties of onboarding n merchants -Customer/business/product development difficulties and successes -Running a meetup

and anything else!

Let's go!

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480 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 21 Nov 2022

In your view what is the biggest roadblock preventing circular bitcoin economies from forming today?

247 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

There are amazing projects building out the foundation and infrastructure necessary to support rapidly growing adoption, but imo there are not enough projects building out the application layers to make people want to use it for non-ideological/early adopter reasons. This will come. We've been doing this at Oshi for a long time, although we probably started a bit early ;)

Often times I think we are our own roadblock. Many of us are so ideological on how transformative and revolutionary bitcoin is, it becomes difficult to understand how anyone in normieland wouldn't immediately change their behavior and use the future of money. We all need to realize that most people will never understand bitcoin and why it's so critical to use it in order to advance humanity, and that's ok.

Get businesses and consumers onboarded to the infrastructure, and build cool shit that people actually want to use for reasons other than NgU or 'because bitcoin is going to fix the world' (even though it is and will).

677 sats \ 1 reply \ @juan 21 Nov 2022

Shoutout from the Lightsats Team!✌🏼

Question about businesses being onboarded, I tried going to a local restaurant called Hometown BBQ here in Miami, they were listed on btcmap.org and also on iBex Pay map indicating that they accepted bitcoin as payments. As soon as I went to go ask the Cashier if they did she got all nervous and immediately said no.

So I feel like some business owners want to start accepting bitcoin payments but their staff are not being properly trained or educated on the subject and most often enough will prefer to say no.

What do you think would be the correct approach to have business owners properly train their staff?

And how can the community help?

218 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Everyone wants to talk about how many businesses are being onboarded to bitcoin, but no one is really talking about how many customers are actually using it. Business adoption at this point is probably more of a vanity statistic. It's good data and great to get an overview, but what you described is fairly common.

In short, the answer is increasing transactions so staff get practice and feel comfortable. I think it would be far better to have a small number of businesses who know what's going on, with hundreds of consumers using it. Consumers using it would be a natural way to train the staff.

The process for a business to accept bitcoin is insanely easy. If staff can use a calculator they can use a lightning point of sale. My advice would be to focus less on how we can better train businesses, and more on how we can better incentivize consumers to participate in the bitcoin economy more frequently.

Ultimiately the community can help by really making it a point to pay with bitcoin. Perhaps don't be so intimidated by the insecurity or lack of knowledge of the cashier. Become familiar with the tools and know how IBEX, Strike, or OpenNode works, so whenever a flustered employee doesn't know what to do, you can walk them through it and perhaps they'll remember.

Of course, this isn't really scalable, though. The best thing we can do as developers/enthusiasts/builders is to find novel ways to increase the use of bitcoin in some way shape or form so businesses and their staff get more transactions and practice. The more consumers we get to use participate, the more the business will dedicate time to ensure the staff know what to do.

Consumers will be the ones driving demand. I'm learning that more and more!

376 sats \ 1 reply \ @sb 21 Nov 2022

How can plebs help expand your network and on-board businesses?

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

We're working on tools to help you help us. Soon TM.

Ultimiately, it's about building trust and relationships with businesses near you, and leveraging that to introduce them to something unique and interesting: bitcoin.

If you already know a business owner, have a chat with them about Oshi and what accepting bitcoin may do for their business. Maybe you have a friend or family member who owns a business, or they know someone who owns a business - leverage that!

Talk with friends and family about using bitcoin to buy something. SHOW them how to do it. Set them up with a wallet (something like Strike or CashApp is a nice stepping stone to the bitcoin economy).

If you're looking to bootstrap a Bitcoin Beach near you, realize it's all about community and trust at the local level. The most distributed, trustless network on the face of the earth is all about trust!

Get familiar with the tools and show businesses and consumers any chance you get how bitcoin works. Send them a few sats, show them what a bitcoin point of sale looks like, etc. At the local level, it all starts with you.

563 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 21 Nov 2022

How do you upkeep that beard of yours?

44 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

I'm sorry to say there is very little PoW associated with my beard. I'm merely a cantillionaire closest to the good beard genetics spigot.

459 sats \ 1 reply \ @cascdr 21 Nov 2022 freebie

New in ATX..software developer that's new to Bitcoin. What would you recommend as some good ways to start getting up to speed on developing on bitcoin projects and contributing to the movement?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

There's so many great open source projects you can check out and contribute to. People recognize proof of work in the bitcoin space, so tinkering around with things and getting in wherever you can is very helpful. Network as much as possible!

You should check out Pleb Lab as well.

Also, Bolt.fun is a really great way to meet people and learn more about developing on lightning.

262 sats \ 2 replies \ @bitcoingraffiti 21 Nov 2022

Favy Sci-Fil novel? And wen moon?

34 sats \ 1 reply \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

I read way too much non-fiction (working on that!), but I really enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Wen moon? When we did our first big sprint to onboard businesses, interest was high because we had already mooned. That's unfortunate. We simply could not build Oshi fast enough to get them going beforehand!

Hoping for a long, drawn out bear market so businesses and consumers can slowly accrue bitcoin and reap all the benefits of NgU tech as we roll into the next bull market. We shall see.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingraffiti 23 Nov 2022

That's a nice book. One of saylor's favies. Thank you, ser. NgU for the win.

260 sats \ 2 replies \ @beorange 21 Nov 2022

The concept seems interesting.

My question is:

Based on your experience, what is the best way to convince and onboard new merchants into the bitcoin economy?

Also:

What are the biggest challenges they bring into the table and in what areas do you face more resistance?

38 sats \ 1 reply \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Businesses generally want just one thing: More customers. Offering them a way to potentially generate more customers and dabble in the bitcoin economy as well is enticing. Especially considering it takes very little time to get set up and very little, if any, staff training.

It's not so much about teaching them the way of bitcoin and why they should get some. It's becoming far more about how we can bring them more customers without having to change much of anything operationally.

The biggest challenges are around the point of sale and finding novel ways to integrate into it to reduce any headache for staff or business owners. We're getting there.

Aside from that, the biggest challenge of them all is finding ways to get the everday consumer to regularly use the app and convey the value prop of it. By accepting debit/credit cards in the very near future, this should help, but ultimiately we are laser focused on ways in which (albeit over time) we can get consumers to actually use lightning network to help businesses help them earn more rewards.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingraffiti 23 Nov 2022

251 sats \ 1 reply \ @BeardedSaintRef 21 Nov 2022

What have you seen from companies that have made it difficult for them to incorporate bitcoin into their business?

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

For brick and mortar businesses simply accepting it isn't a big deal, but the big hurdle for staff and operations would be the point of sale system they use. Next would be a lack of understanding/unwillingness to understand that they can use bitcoin as a network, without necessarily getting any exposure to the asset itself. Working with bigger companies means going up the chain of command, which is time consuming.

For Ecommerce, businesses using systems that have very limited API access can be a show-stopper, making it very difficult to incorporate it at all.

214 sats \ 4 replies \ @nerd2ninja 21 Nov 2022

So, this kind of looks okay. I can see if you're doing sats back and you're the only business that accepts sats, then customers have to come back to you in order to spend their "rewards points" (which happen to be Bitcoin). But without the option to pay with card through Oshi, I think you're only going to find people who already have Bitcoin being interested in paying with this.

A common problem with businesses that accept Bitcoin has been that people pay with Bitcoin so infrequently, that by the time someone shows up happy to pay with sats, the employee training is not there to actually know what's going on.

I could not recommend this to a business if there is no option for paying with card to earn sats back. Without that functionality, I'd just be encouraging them to walk into a headache.

48 sats \ 3 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Very good points!

Early on we were a bit blinded by the hardcore bitcoin ideology. We're here for that, too, but we realized that most consumers simply cannot be bothered to make a bitcoin transaction (even bitcoiners), and when it happens so infrequently, paired with staff turnover, it can lead to headache, yes.

We aimed to solve this a few different ways:

We're releasing debit/credit card purchases in the app soon so people can stack sats on local purchases without having to pay with bitcoin. This is yet another bridge from normieland to a bitcoin future and it seems we're having to build more and more of them.
The ability to redeem purchases as a gift card, so there's absolutely no staff training needed (unless they don't know how to redeem a gift card). We're working with more Point of Sales to improve this process.
A new feature coming out soonTM that'll dramatically improve the customer/employee/business experience and be familiar to everyone.

I will say this, though - Generally people figure these things out. Occasionally staff doesn't know what to do, but I think it is a positive experience overall more times than not. Improvements are 100% coming though!

Great question/comment. Appreciate you.

200 sats \ 2 replies \ @NorthKoreanHostage 22 Nov 2022

Look. The solution is simple.

When the cashier asks for money, the customer needs to be presented with options of how to pay. One of those options should be tapping a button on the POS screen to pay with Bitcoin lightning. The screen shows a QR code. Customer scans and pays. Receipt prints. Customer explodes with exuberance.

This is not rocket science.

Every POS should have lightning integrated. The cashier shouldn't even know what the hell the customer is doing.

How is this not already standard?

You guys should hire me to fix everything.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @michael OP 22 Nov 2022

🤣

You are correct. This is how it should be, but unfortunately it isn't... yet!

Thought experiment. If suddenly, every single point of sale in the world had seamless lightning payment options, would anyone actually pay with it? The overwhelming majority of people would not. Saving 3-5% in processing fees of zero transactions is a savings of zero. Where is the consumer incentive? This is what we're trying to solve and provide a good experience for.

Next step would be for whomever integrated with that point of sale to offer bitcoin rewards to the consumer AT LEAST as much as they're already getting through their current credit or debit card. Ok, but how do they know which wallet the customer is paying with? They don't, because lightning network's onion routing - unless of course there's some sort of integration or middleware to figure this out, OR the same wallet the customer is paying with is also the LSP of the merchant, in which case that seems to be rather antithetical to bitcoin ethos. USE THIS WALLET TO GET REWARDS AND ONLY THIS WALLET otherwise you get nothing and have zero incentives to pay with bitcoin. Sounds kind of scary in the long run, and very much a walled garden.

We're a bit ahead of the game, but we are trying to fix this issue while providing interoperability and a seamless consumer experience. Because frankly, it matters now how many businesses are accepting bitcoin - it only matters how many people are willing to pay with it.

StackStacker if you can figure all of this out we will in fact hire you to fix everything ;)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 22 Nov 2022

If we can just get Visa and other card payments to be part of the same point of sale system as Lightning network payments, we can easily do the rewards program within that system via lightsats redemptions (or an Oshi implementation of lightsats redemptions if it were so desired.)

129 sats \ 1 reply \ @btcretriever 21 Nov 2022

Hi Michael,

Can you share some general feedback you have received from the small business owners that have been using Oshi for a few months/ year ?

Is there any trending suggestions or sentiments?

Thanks!

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Many of the businesses owners consider it a 'set it and forget it' kind of thing. It's incredibly easy to get set up in most cases, so it's something they can use to start accepting bitcoin, offer rewards, and bring in some new customers here and there

They're appreciative and eager to try something new! Because their Bitcoin transaction volume is very low compared to their overall sales, they aren't sweating any of the current market situtaiton.

175 sats \ 2 replies \ @ashdraked 21 Nov 2022

Does Oshi ever Oshi pill businesses? There was a recent time on twitter where y’all onboarded a lot of businesses and I was curious if you guys chatted with each business and Oshi pilled them

43 sats \ 1 reply \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

You bet! We are generally the ones to get a business interested in Oshi; however, there is an increasing amount of inbound from fellow bitcoiners who are approaching businesses near them about Oshi and dishing out the Oshi pill themselves.

I think the orange pilling of businesses and consumers isn't all it's cracked up to be. Most people simply don't care, and the honest truth is that they probably never will, and that's ok. We've found it's far easier to Oshi pill first, then work towards the orange pill over time.

54 sats \ 0 replies \ @ashdraked 21 Nov 2022

I agree 100% because Oshi will directly incentivize them, bitcoin will be hard to sway them at first but Oshi is something more direct

211 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21 Nov 2022

How has your vision for Oshi changed over the last year?

258 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Great question.

While the overall vision is about the same, the steps we've taken, or the steps we thought we'd be taking, have dramatically changed. Product, customer, and business development has been an ever-changing and very wild ride.

We used to think that step 1 for businesses was all about simply accepting it, and step 1 for consumers was to simply learn how to spend it. Wrong. While many of us can make that first step (or several steps) and take it in stride, many businesses and consumers see that step as almost insurmountable.

We stopped trying to orange pill everyone and focused on oshi pilling people. We could do so much more for bitcoin and our vision by building a great product people of all backgrounds could use. Meeting the business and consumer where they are instead of meeting them where we'd like them to be. This is how we win.

300 sats \ 1 reply \ @emiliomorles 21 Nov 2022

Well done. Keep spreading the 🍊 💊 around your community and I think every single one of us need to do it in ours too. I think the "-Bitcoin rewards" topic is the best one for our job. ✌️😎

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Thank you! We think bitcoin rewards will be the entry point to the bitcoin rabbit hole for most people. Fortunately, our platform is built from the ground up with hyperbitcoinization in mind, so although we're widening the funnel, the endpoint for our user journey is actively participating in the bitcoin circular economy.

One step at a time :)

75 sats \ 2 replies \ @andre_yg 21 Nov 2022

Is there anything specific that comes to mind that gets most business owners on board when oshi pilling them?

63 sats \ 1 reply \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Bring you more customers
Supercharge whatever rewards/incentive program you're already running with Bitcoin instead
Take bitcoin for a test spin, risk free
First step to future-proof your business

Note I really don't talk much about the 21M cap, store of value, inflation hedge, lower payment processing fees, or that bitcoin is the thermodynamic bridge between the digital and physical realms ;)

They generally don't care. Love the businesses who do care about these things, but we need to be honest with ourselves - they don't care and won't care until they get started and dive into the rabbit hole themselves.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @andre_yg 22 Nov 2022

Thank you for the answer, this was super helpful!

45 sats \ 1 reply \ @ashdraked 21 Nov 2022

Cuando oshi global expansion? Idk the regulatory hurdles but feels like some countries payment processing will be harder than the USA so Oshi will be more beneficial to them

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

Definitely.

We're working on that. It's mainly a frontend update for us. We'll be rolling that out as soon as possible so we can help businesses globally!

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @muteness11 21 Nov 2022

for business who are interested in fiat, do you have on/off ramp (BTC/Fiat) for them ?

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022

You bet.

First off, we are not a payment provider/processor. We leave that up to companies like Strike, Bitcoin Beach Wallet, IBEX, OpenNode, and more, OR open source software such as BTCPay server.

So businesses interested in Oshi can always promote their products and offer bitcoin rewards, while still receiving fiat on the backend if they'd like. This is a great first step.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Tristan 22 Nov 2022

Tell us the secret to having a great beard