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48 sats \ 3 replies \ @michael OP 21 Nov 2022 \ parent \ on: I'm Michael Atwood, founder of Oshi & organizer of Austin Bitcoin Club. AMA. bitcoin
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.
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.
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🤣
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 ;)
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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.)
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