Announcing the Bitcoin Kiez rollout

[Ente]

Get in touch with me, I wish to add you guys to http://bitcoinnavigator.com

I added all three new locations.

Ente

[yossarian]

fyi: http://bitcoinmagazine.net/bitcoin-kiez-rollout-3-new-btc-accepting-stores-and-restaurants-in-berlin-more-to-come/

[paraipan]

Love this!

+1  keep up the good work guys

[World]

Can you describe a little more information as to Counts BTC to Financial Statement,and is it legal in Germany? thx

[phelix]

This is awesome. Next time I get to Berlin I will make sure to buy something.

Now we need the same in Munich.

Could you explain how it is done?

How it is done:
Joe runs the ROOM77, and accepts Bitcoin for two years now. So he knows his stuff. He is in touch with his fellow shops, bars, restaurants and neighbors. Being enthusiastic about Bitcoin, it was inevitable to turn them to Bitcoin - one after one! :-)

Yes, I think this is the way - Talk to the people. This is much better "advertising" than large billboard ads!

Yes, exiting stuff happens here, Berlin Bitcoin Kiez.
..and this is just the beginning!

Ente

  I meant how does the system work. Just a smartphone or is there more to it?

[2weiX]

This is awesome. Next time I get to Berlin I will make sure to buy something.

Now we need the same in Munich.

Could you explain how it is done?

How it is done:
Joe runs the ROOM77, and accepts Bitcoin for two years now. So he knows his stuff. He is in touch with his fellow shops, bars, restaurants and neighbors. Being enthusiastic about Bitcoin, it was inevitable to turn them to Bitcoin - one after one! :-)

Yes, I think this is the way - Talk to the people. This is much better "advertising" than large billboard ads!

Yes, exiting stuff happens here, Berlin Bitcoin Kiez.
..and this is just the beginning!

Ente

  I meant how does the system work. Just a smartphone or is there more to it?

10 GOTO BAR
20 DRINK IF DRUNK GOTO TOILET THEN GOTO 40
30 GOTO 2O
40 POINT PHONE AT QR
50 PAY
60 GOTO NEXT BAR

[yossarian]

This is awesome. Next time I get to Berlin I will make sure to buy something.

Now we need the same in Munich.

Could you explain how it is done?

How it is done:
Joe runs the ROOM77, and accepts Bitcoin for two years now. So he knows his stuff. He is in touch with his fellow shops, bars, restaurants and neighbors. Being enthusiastic about Bitcoin, it was inevitable to turn them to Bitcoin - one after one! :-)

Yes, I think this is the way - Talk to the people. This is much better "advertising" than large billboard ads!

Yes, exiting stuff happens here, Berlin Bitcoin Kiez.
..and this is just the beginning!

Ente

  I meant how does the system work. Just a smartphone or is there more to it?

The new merchants all installed the Satoshi client on their laptops. We simply printed one of their public keys to a plain sheet of paper, including a QR-code and and btc.to-link to that address, which was put up on the wall.

Customers can now copy that address and send the required amount in BTC. We assume that most customers will use the Schildbach/blockchain.info client for Android or easywallet for iPhone to pay. Both offer automated currency conversion, so you can simply type in the required amount in EUR.

The merchant can check if the payment got in by opening up blockchain.info with his public address (which we bookmarked on their laptops).

Not sure if that's the most convenient option, but it seems to work. We'll most likely smoothen out the process soon, but need some feedback from the merchants or their customers first. We also had a discussion what client we should use for the merchants, and we decided to stick to the Satoshi client for the time being, combined with the additional features provided by blockchain.info.

[fornit]

so you can only link a customer to a payment via the paid amount?

[joecooin]

so you can only link a customer to a payment via the paid amount?

Yes.

Only the EUR value of the purchase goes into the books.

Alternatively one can book the BTC onto one account and declare the value of that ballance according to the exchange rate at the time of the tax declaration. This makes more sense when one starts to also pay for business expenses in BTC.

We will upgrade the wallets of the bars / restaurants with nfc chips so the waiters can just walk up to a table, tell the amount to be paid, transmit the address and once they walked back behind the bar they can already check if the payment is on the way. Unconfirmed transaction on the blockchain is enough.

Works fine.

Joe

[Stephen Gornick]

The new merchants all installed the Satoshi client on their laptops.

Make sure the clients are configured for outgoing communications only ( -nolisten ).  This is because knowing the IP address of the node, it becomes not terribly hard to perform a race attack to double spend.  And the way the Bitcioin.org client functions, the merchant might not even notice ... the transaction would just disappear as if it had never been made.

It might even be seen as a challenge by someone to be the first to pull off a race attack double spend against a bricks and mortar merchant.  If configured with -nolisten (and optionally, an outgoing connection made explicitly to a well-connected node), then the chance of a race attack succeeding is much much lower, to where the profit on the sale is likely orders of magnitude greater than any losses due to a race attack double spend.

[phelix]

This is awesome. Next time I get to Berlin I will make sure to buy something.

Now we need the same in Munich.

Could you explain how it is done?

How it is done:
Joe runs the ROOM77, and accepts Bitcoin for two years now. So he knows his stuff. He is in touch with his fellow shops, bars, restaurants and neighbors. Being enthusiastic about Bitcoin, it was inevitable to turn them to Bitcoin - one after one! :-)

Yes, I think this is the way - Talk to the people. This is much better "advertising" than large billboard ads!

Yes, exiting stuff happens here, Berlin Bitcoin Kiez.
..and this is just the beginning!

Ente

  I meant how does the system work. Just a smartphone or is there more to it?

The new merchants all installed the Satoshi client on their laptops. We simply printed one of their public keys to a plain sheet of paper, including a QR-code and and btc.to-link to that address, which was put up on the wall.

Customers can now copy that address and send the required amount in BTC. We assume that most customers will use the Schildbach/blockchain.info client for Android or easywallet for iPhone to pay. Both offer automated currency conversion, so you can simply type in the required amount in EUR.

The merchant can check if the payment got in by opening up blockchain.info with his public address (which we bookmarked on their laptops).

Not sure if that's the most convenient option, but it seems to work. We'll most likely smoothen out the process soon, but need some feedback from the merchants or their customers first. We also had a discussion what client we should use for the merchants, and we decided to stick to the Satoshi client for the time being, combined with the additional features provided by blockchain.info.

simple is good. You might consider using Multibit, though, as it is much faster and more lightweight.

[...]
We will upgrade the wallets of the bars / restaurants with nfc chips so the waiters can just walk up to a table, tell the amount to be paid, transmit the address and once they walked back behind the bar they can already check if the payment is on the way. Unconfirmed transaction on the blockchain is enough.
[...]

why not stick to qr codes for now?


@2weix: It's been so long I wrote any BASIC that today I only understand Python.

[2weiX]

you know what would be awesome:


a smallish device that can be used to tally totals and print out a human readable total plus a BTC QR code.
the receiving end should be a paper wallet, the waiter could have a tablet with blockchain.info app and the paper wallet added as a "to watch" adress, incoming trx will show up within seconds.

[yossarian]

The new merchants all installed the Satoshi client on their laptops.

Make sure the clients are configured for outgoing communications only ( -nolisten ).  This is because knowing the IP address of the node, it becomes not terribly hard to perform a race attack to double spend.  And the way the Bitcioin.org client functions, the merchant might not even notice ... the transaction would just disappear as if it had never been made.

It might even be seen as a challenge by someone to be the first to pull off a race attack double spend against a bricks and mortar merchant.  If configured with -nolisten (and optionally, an outgoing connection made explicitly to a well-connected node), then the chance of a race attack succeeding is much much lower, to where the profit on the sale is likely orders of magnitude greater than any losses due to a race attack double spend.

The merchants will use blockchain.info to check their balances and not always wait for their client to update, so this shouldn't be an issue. Or am I missing something?

[Ente]

so you can only link a customer to a payment via the paid amount?

Yes.

Only the EUR value of the purchase goes into the books.

Alternatively one can book the BTC onto one account and declare the value of that ballance according to the exchange rate at the time of the tax declaration. This makes more sense when one starts to also pay for business expenses in BTC.

We will upgrade the wallets of the bars / restaurants with nfc chips so the waiters can just walk up to a table, tell the amount to be paid, transmit the address and once they walked back behind the bar they can already check if the payment is on the way. Unconfirmed transaction on the blockchain is enough.

Works fine.

Joe

Maybe it would make sense to automatically save the used conversion rate when receiving a Bitcoin payment? The schildbach client obviously knows the rate, so it could write it into a simple text file too.
I just imagined the horror when a tax guy sees your bitcoins in your tax declaration, and wants to know every single conversion rate for every of those 749 Bitcoin payments.. It probably wouldn't even be possible to find out the "24h mean exchange rate" from a month ago?

Ente

[2weiX]

another option:

convert the btc to eur once a day / week / month via mtgox.
generate a report for each month:

xxxx BTC
converted to
YYYY €

and put that on your tax report, provable by bank account statement (mtgox sepa wire)

[Stephen Gornick]

The merchants will use blockchain.info to check their balances and not always wait for their client to update, so this shouldn't be an issue. Or am I missing something?

That's probably works as well as any other approach.    Some people might recommend avoiding a third-party source for blockchain and transaction data, but for amounts in the burgers and beers range, I would trust Blockchain.info's data for that.

[Mike Hearn]

Wonderful!

Joe, I tried to visit Room77 when I was last in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately it was closed (this was around 2pm). I would have gone later but some of my friends are vegetarian. It'd be nice if there was a website or some other place where we can see what's on the menu.

Satoshi client is (for now) a good choice for them, as long as they keep it running all the time. I hope that soon you can migrate them to something lighter-weight, like a new 0.8 release of the Satoshi client or MultiBit. Otherwise they may find that they cannot keep up and want to stop running the software.

Good luck!

[yossarian]

some more coverage: http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/35733263353/bitcoin-clusters

[Ente]

Wonderful!

Joe, I tried to visit Room77 when I was last in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately it was closed (this was around 2pm). I would have gone later but some of my friends are vegetarian. It'd be nice if there was a website or some other place where we can see what's on the menu.

Good luck!

Room77 opens at 3pm normally.
Also: I eat the cheese nachos for more than a year now - every fkn time! :-)
No, people have no clue what awesomeness they will receive if they haven't been in the Room before!

Let us know when you are around next time, there'll be some of us around!

Ente

[World]

here is a nice solution to:
http://acceptbit.com/