Topic: I Opened another business were I accept Bitcoin - page 4. (Read 1088 times)

Afaik it wasn't a scam as long as you see that there is an incoming transaction in your wallet. You shouldn't worry anymore by there because the coins will always arrive even if it takes a long time due to the network congestion or to the fees that is set when sending the btc.

Every business has a risk but according to what you are doing, you will be just fine because you educate your employees properly. They will now be aware if what they should do in different scenarios. You should not worry and don't ever think of stopping this business because we all want to see it grow and maybe some of us will help you support it because we also love the idea of spreading the word btc in your own ways.

Regardless of the business, you are running, all must refer to the policy of the region where Bitcoin transactions are allowed. If not, you may be taking a big risk. But to make sure that such a transaction business proves to be effective, try within the next month to see the prospects you generate and the feedback from people on the provision of transaction services. Make a kind of small evaluation when every time your customer has made a transaction give some kind of simple assessment and ask them to evaluate the performance and service satisfaction honestly.

Everything OP narrated sounds good but there is hardly anyone in Nigeria trading crypto that doesn't know the exchange P2P transaction and Nigerians as we have known from previous info are at the top of that transaction in Africa
and also rated highly in the World so I was wondering, why would I want to spaned 35min waiting for a transaction to get through and even pay an additional $3 fee because I want to cash out some Satoshi? As I said, the narrative sounds good for Bitcoin but the transaction is faulty from the seller's point of view.

Yes, that 30 minutes waiting time for the transaction to confirm, is going to be a problem.. if you use legacy Bitcoin. (Was this a SegWit transaction or Legacy Bitcoin?) The alternative might be to use the Lightning Network, if your customers are familiar with it... it is almost instant transactions at a fraction of the cost they are paying now. 

Well, good luck with your new business venture... I hope it will be very successful in the future.. just don't give up.    I will give people a small incentive to rather use Bitcoin over other payment methods, by introducing a discount for people who are paying with bitcoins. 

I also want to start a business where all kinds of crypto will be accepted, but our luck is not good what kind of transaction in our country government people say money laundering that's why it is very difficult to work in cryptocurrency in our country, but I wish sometime in the future if cryptocurrency or blockchain When it is legal in our country I will accept almost all types of cryptocurrencies in my business and I wish to have an online store where cryptocurrencies will be accepted but currently, it is not possible in our country, but I can't do anything about it but hopefully in the near future blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be in our country. It Will be legalized, and then we can work with blockchain and cryptocurrency in the open.

at least your initiative to accept bitcoin in your business is a great thing. But when your customer wants to withdraw money by exchanging bitcoins for you. then it takes time. so to save time I guess after 1 confirmation it's enough to be able to cash it into money. so there won't be many people waiting in line. but your business category is indeed popular in the area where I work. so that people rarely queue up to the ATM to withdraw money from the bank.
it's very helpful and a great initiative in today's business.

Congratulation OP on starting your new business. But as you know, it is not just about starting a new business in addition to the one you already have but being able to manage both of them successfully. Expansion in business always requires an extra level of commitment. You must also realise that as you have made your business a centerpoint for exchange of cryptocurrency, you have also become targets for scammers and people who may want to try out schemes to try to fool you or your staff. Prepare yourself and staff for such individuals, so you don't have a bitter experience.

Congratulations for your business idea and including bitcoin in your business. It has helped you to have a very good feel about Bitcoin transactions. When you said that you were afraid if it was a scam. That is not how bitcoin transactions work, you don't have to hand out cash unless the person sends you the transaction ID and you go into blockchain and confirm truly that the transaction is in queue and atleast a block has been confirmed before you can handout cash. More careful next time.

Well, congratulations if this is another business that you've come up with that's related to bitcoin and you're not just talking it with words but you're actually applying it.

You are a legitimate entrepreneur as you are solving problems that you see within your community. It's going to be accompanied by fees and that's already part and given with we know how the bitcoin atm works. So, with this POS business you started, I guess you'll discover many things, the ins and outs of it.

Good luck!

Yes, POS is a point of sale used in the supermarket, it's also used in the supermarket in my country but it saves more like an ATM in my country because of how the bank ATM is usually crowded, some youths like us has turned POS into a business were customers comes to your shop and Carry out any transaction with their debit card.
  For example; some one can come to my shop and ask to withdraw cash, all I need to do is slot in his card into my POS marching, type-in the amount he/she wishes to withdraw, they put their pin and Money will go from their account to my account then I will give them the cash they need.  (POS business in Nigeria is just like performing a manual process of an ATM).


POS does not accept Bitcoin, but some one can decide to receive Bitcoin from customers and give them cash
Equivalent to the Bitcoin they sent. Let me assume you came to my shop and you need cash but you want to send
me Bitcoin and receive cash equivalent to the Bitcoin you sent.

Ok, apart from congratulating you on helping somebody spend his coins, I do have to say I feel like this whole POS thing as I see it and understand based on this article
https://techpoint.africa/2021/07/15/pos-business-in-nigeria
is like one huge step backward.

Basically, what every one of these operators is doing is acting like the exact fourth party between the customer and the service provider that needs to be paid, counting the third party as the bank that does the actual money transfer?

So rather than having a simple bank app from which you can pay your bills with a tap directly from your bank account you go to the POS shop, you hand this guy the bill, you pay him an extra 2-3 maybe 5% and he pays the bill for you? Am I right?

Being a Nigerian myself and live in area where POS is a popular business among youths, I find it a bit difficult to believe you are the first person accepting bitcoin in a POS business, 98 percent of POS operators in Nigeria are youths, and more than 80 percent of this youths know a thing or two about bitcoin and crypto currencies, 60 percent of this people have bitcoin logo on their POS banner which means they accept bitcoin or will accept it upon request.

There are different modes of setting the miner fee and I think the customer deliberately set the miner fee low which is why the transaction took that amount of time to confirm, see the images below for a better understanding...




My advice is, next time you have a customer who want to send bitcoin to you and receive the cash equivalent, make sure the customer put the MINER FEE setting to priority, and if possible, politely make the customer to wait until the transaction receives atleast, one blockchain confirmation before they can leave.
I will personally suggest you type the above in a paper, print it out and paste it all over your POS shop, make it as a rule that customers transacting in bitcoin must set miner fee to priority and after sending bitcoin,. Must wait for 1 blockchain confirmation before they can take cash and leave.
This is to avoid or bring to the barest minimum, the chances of encountering a payment reversal where Bitcoin sent end up reversing back to the address it came from.

I'm also not familiar with this kind of service, because thanks to digital banking accounts which can be accessed on any smartphones every payments and transactions can be done virtually directly between seller and buyer without middlemen services included. I believe if people there had internet access and devices such as smartphones they could do these transactions by themselves, saving on fees. Or maybe middlemen services will keep existing to assist older generations making their payments, since they have some difficult or lack of interest for learning how to use technological devices in general.

In my opinion, this is neither good nor bad. If you say you just started the my candid advice to you is to manage the bitcoin transactions yourself until your staff has a firm grasp of it.  Secondly, I think it may be risky to operate this openly as regards the ban by the Central Bank on cryptocurrency businesses. Lastly, I am aware that the exchange rate differs as regarding the amount of Bitcoin needed. In other words, the exchange rate is greater for someone wishing to trade $100 worth of bitcoin than it is for someone wishing to swap $40. How would you approach this?

POS is basically this terminal thingy that's often available at the supermarket if a person wants to pay by card, right? In my experience, it's something that it just available for payment by card wherever card payments are accepted. I assume it's different in Nigeria, as the op mentions people crowding around ATMs to get cash?
It's hard for me to understand what the POS business is normally about because to me POS is just a piece of hardware to which you can bring your card or smartphone to complete a transaction to pay for goods. Is it selling POS devices? Is it renting devices to merchants for a fee? Is it something else entirely?
Also, can a POS accept Bitcoin? Or is it accepting Bitcoin for the terminals themselves? I read the post, but it's difficult for me to make out the details because of how differently I probably perceive a POS.

Before handing over your FIAT currency to an unknown customer, always ensure that the transaction was successful. Trust is a very serious issue that we must be very cautious about. When you give out money (FIAT) before confirming the transaction, some people can double spend the Bitcoin and you will lose it all because you gave your FIAT out of trust. For more information, try studying how the memory pool works using the link provided by @Lucius.
You have a very good innovation and idea to start this business as well as try to teach your employees more about Bitcoin and how Bitcoin transactions work; the only risk is that the Government of Nigeria has yet to legalize Bitcoin, so you are exposing yourself to risk; it is better you do it secretly for your own safety.

In my country, POS was often used as a cash register in stores, to make payments and transactions easier, as the times progressed with technology and the internet, it has entered remote areas with today's sophistication, Point of Sales (POS) has been used by ordinary entrepreneurs in payments in cash.

With the available features, as you said, yes indeed POS is feasible to be a business, especially payments, orders, product purchases for customers, without having to bother going far for example to banks, ATMs and so on, bottom line: if you take $3 in per transaction to a customer, that's a great and profitable business these days.

Great initiative and good luck with the business.

Have you thought about automating the crypto part of your business in any way by using a crypto payment processor to take care of addresses and amounts? Judging by your explanation, all that was manually done. You generated an address, sent it to your colleague, they then gave it to the customer, the customer paid and waited over half an hour for the transaction to go through. Imagine having 10 people in quick succession who want to pay with BTC, you are going to have to give them each a separate address, check, and keep track of who has paid and how much.

Another potential problem is taxes. Are you in the system, do you pay taxes on the turnover you generate? 

There is nothing to stop if bitcoin transactions in your country are legal. What you do will certainly have a positive impact on how to trade with bitcoin. In addition to running this business, you also provide education to some of your employees. this is an added value that makes your business must continue to run.

In my country, this kind of business may soon be closed by the local government because it uses digital currency which is not allowed to replace fiat currency.

This business will run well and continue to grow if you also provide education to your customers, because there are customers who of course do not fully understand bitcoin.

Good idea!, but this people that will pay you in Bitcoin must be Big guys and Big men I guess, adding $3 as transaction fees to your customer in Nigeria is huge amount and might scare them away from doing business with you , I suggest you remove it as you are just getting started to attract more customers, then later you can add your charges. However, if you do have an account with any platform that has P2P like Binance for instance, though I'm not encouraging you should keep your cryptos in a centralized exchange, but in this case Binance P2P will make things easier for you, in terms of selling your Crypto back to Cash. therefore you need not to add $3 transaction fees to your customers because that is approximately (#2000) Nigeria Naira as at today's exchange rate of #700 -$1 dollar.