so one of my co workers has seen the success I've been having mining bitcoin lately and loves the concept. he owns a bar in new orleans and thinks it would be great to start accepting bitcoin for all drinks and dart supplies he sells at the store. then advertise it around the city and LSU/UNO campus for the tech savvy cats that love to drink. his biggest concern in speaking with him is how to get someone to pay their tab quickly, with a decent price closely related to the daily market price. is there nothing out there yet that can make this easier on merchants? to be honest having some drunk bartender calculate exchange rates and swap long bitcoin addresses quickly seems very inefficient. plus won't there be time where the customer has to wait for a few confirmations to come through? wish there was a quicker way with this stuff. thanks for any info it's much appreciated. forgive any misspellings. I'm iphoning from muh sofa.
There are a couple of Android apps already; there's an iPhone app also but it's only for jailbroken iPhones right now (since Apple keeps rejecting it for no apparent reason).
What's really needed, as you might guess, is a cash register that is already set up to accept Bitcoins. The problem is 95% of the cash register solutions out there are not at all extensible in the way open source stuff is, so it would be hard for anyone but the original vendor to do a complete integration. That said, it wouldn't be that difficult to set up a little netbook or something to generate QR codes and do currency conversion for those who want to pay in Bitcoins.
This is an active research topic for me, and I'm definitely interested in learning more about the existing setups that merchants have. One thing that your bar owner can do now is to have a chat with the sales rep for his cash register/point of sale equipment and let him know that he would like to have Bitcoin integration in the cash registers. It won't happen immediately, of course, but if the vendors hear it enough, they will see the demand and cater to it.