Topic: Problems buying with bitcoins at restaurant. (Read 790 times)

I would sure like that But that would be kinda nolifish..

Hi Bear,

nice to see you're considering accepting BTC at your establishment.

There are several ways to go about what you want to accomplish.

For instance you could use a third party to handle all the technical details, for example bitinstant. They would be happy to help set you up. But this also means you'd have to buy a small fee: 1-2%.

You could also program a custom system, either yourself or have a developer do it, then  you'd have to do the conversion to fiat yourself, if you didn't want to keep the bitcoins.

Depending on how you set it up, it should be pretty straightforward for the waiter. For instance, you could have a tablet, or another device at the restaurant, that automatically calculates the number of the btc the customer is supposed to pay.

So the waiter would only have to input the stuff the customer bought, and press 'pay with btc'. The screen would then present a QR-code and a btc-address the customer would have to send the bitcoins to. Once the customer scans the QR-code with his smart phone and makes the payment, it'll show up as 'paid' on the tablet, and the waiter have done her/his job.

If you don't think there will be much of an influx of btc customers at your restaurant, you could opt for the very low tech approach. Just publish a fixed bitcoin address on your homepage, then any customer who wants to pay with btc just sends bitcoins there, and the waiter just looks up the exchange rate calculates the amount of btc the customer needs to pay. The, the waiter could just click on a fixed link to blockchain.info where he could look up whether the payment were received or not. The waiter could then just store the receipt with a note on it: Paid with bitcoins. And then you could just sort everything out once you got to work.

A few simple steps would be enough for the waiter to know, and since people always forget, esp. when they do not do something very frequently, just make a poster that hangs at the bar explaining the few steps required.

I was planning on starting to accept BTC at my restaurant  www.GilliesConeyisland.com
once I figured it out more,

reading this thread helped me out a LOT.
I WAS thinking about accepting them if paying in advance - to help get them confirmed, but now realize, that's silly - risk of double pay has to be much less than Credit Card cost even without the back charges!!


NOW, if someone can explain how I can have ALL the Cashiers trained to handle the RARE BTC transaction PROPERLY.
I'm not worried about it while I'm there, but when I'm not, some cashier has to have access first, to my computer (our POS doesn't touch the internet) and then on my computer, they'll need to see it accepted in my account?? with a password??

Every day there seems to be more and more merchants that are accepting BTC as a legit form of payment!

Yes! There are many real-life businesses starting to accept Bitcoin

Yes, he should've done more research. But people are usually just like that, lazy. If you plan well ahead, then chances are that things are not going to end badly if something goes wrong. For instance, if you're doing a p2p exchange with somebody, if you both keep the required amount available on your phone + have access to some online wallet outside the phone, you're pretty much secured. In the event your phone becomes inaccessible, you could just use another device to access funds and complete the trade.

Wait!.. So you are saying you can use Bitcoin to pay in restaurants

What I was talking about is the person paying, the merchant sounds like they were using blockchain.info to do payment and did it correctly. The person paying should have tried it out before hand or *researched* it out more. I know people just want to fire up an app and pay, but today in bitcoins that isn't going to happen. The protocol is still in beta, most this software is still in beta. Honestly this isn't really ready for mainstream adoption and people like this are going to feel burnt and probably not use bitcoins for a while or hoard them. That is life.

For a real-life businesses, the apps they provide for smartphones are easy to use. So many of those who have started accepting Bitcoin have decided to use their services. It's not easy for them to understand that, even though it might be easy to use, it doesn't work properly.

I think it's a lot safer these days than Credit Cards.  Stores get DESTROYED with Chargebacks from fraud.  I'm sure many places would prefer to take the 0.01% risk of a double spend, seeing that the savings in transaction fees from Credit Cards alone would offset that risk.

Clearly this person had no idea what he was doing. Coinbase is not a great mobile wallet unless you want to generate addresses. Coinbase keeps ~90% of their user funds in cold storage and 10% in their hot wallet. This is great for security! Horrible for making mobile payments, cause I bet they also do a lot of checks before sending out payments. So I use blockchain for my wallet on the iphone cause they will always have the funds.

To my understanding, the problem here was not a 0-confirmation transaction. The problem was that the transaction hadn't even registered as a 0-confirmation transaction yet, so as far as the restaurant was concerned then, they hadn't received any payment, and thus he had to wip out his VISA card to complete the payment.

My suggestion was a possible solution to deal with such circumstances, or to make payment 'idiot-proof'.

Otherwise, I agree a 0-confirmation transaction is usually not a problem.

0 conf transactions are a lot safer than some people think.

If the restaurant immediately made a tx to the change address, providing the txid on the receipt, would not that be sufficient. The customer would also know the restaurant, so if there were any troubbles he'd simply go back there and hassle them.

If the customer were paranoid, he could simply issue a transaction to himself for the change and then hand over the privkey to the restaurant which would contain the exact amount. The restaurant should then of course immediately transfer the balance to a company address.

I don't see why a reputable business should have an interest in not giving the customer change back.

The whole point would be to avoid problems with tx'es not going through immediately. You can't sit and wait for too long after you've finished your meal, most people are interested in leaving.

So payment could be just you presenting the 'value-bill', the waiter scanning it and then sending you the change and giving you a receipt. That way, even if there's congestion or other issues sending the transaction, it doesn't matter, because you've paid already, and the waiter could check against the blockchain that the privkey and its corresponding address holds the required value.

I guess the customer could always try to double spend once he leaves the restaurant, but what would be the point in that, and is that a legitimate concern?

This could also be a backup feature of an existing POS-system, kind of like the reserve aka offline transaction done with a VISA card or debit card when there's no connection with the bank and you just swipe your card and sign.

But the problem is as shown in the link I presented in the first post that if you already have issued a tx, it's quite likely to go through after some time, and if you then use the reserve solution, then you'll pay twice.

But I think that it would not be too difficult to guestimate how much you need for a restaurant visit, then loading what you need on a 'value-bill', or on your smartphone - whatever you think is better - before you go to the restaurant. Having it printed on paper would also ensure that in the event your phone runs out of battery, wifi or roaming is not available or your phone is stolen or wrecked, you can still pay with bitcoins. If your phone is inaccesible and you want to pay with btc, there's no way to do that unless you have paper backup aka a 'value-bill'. I guess bitcoin enthusiasts most likely want to walk around without needing a VISA card. I guess most people have both these days, but if it can be paid with bitcoins that must be the desired option.

And of course, this must be a rather simple procedure from the restaurants point of view, it should be so easy that the waiter can learn it in 30 minutes. Everything should be automatic really, there should just be a few manual steps for the waiter, and he could either use a handheld device, a smartphone, or the customer could be asked to go to the cash register where they have a setup for payment.

It's a great idea - but then there'd would be a risk: customers would have to trust the business 100%.

I'm refering to this, and since I'm lazy and didn't bother to create a reddit account right away, I post my input here.

Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1svezj/frustrating_tx_with_bitcoin_had_to_use_my_visa/

TL;DR: Dude had issues paying with bitcoins at restaurant, tx didn't go through fast enough, he took up his visa and paid at the end, then when he got home he saw the tx finally went through.

This solution must've been suggested before, but what about loading an address with a certain amount of btc, then export the private key, and then give the private key to the restaurant, along with a return address for change? Is there any scenarios where that wouldn't work?

Receipt from restaurant could then show how much btc they charge, and how much change went to the customers btc address along with the txid on the receipt.

I don't want to go into minute technical details here, I just wanted to discuss the concept.

But doing it this way means the customer doesn't even need to have a smartphone, he could just print out the 'value-bill' with the required info at home, and bring it to the restaurant.

Once receiving the 'value-bill' containing the privkey and the change address, the restaurant just imports the privkey, immediately dispatches all the value to a business collecting address and sends the change to the customer.

I'm not too familiar with QR-codes, but I assume this could be used for that.

What do you think ?