London Conditional Bitcoin Meetup Saturday, August 6th 2011

[mpkomara]

Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Condition: Merchant pub must accept bitcoins at the meeting, no exceptions, no proxies

[S3052]

sounds like I will need to look for flights to London at that day, would love to pay beer with bitcoins+

[genjix]

August??? Are you joking? That's like 6 months away. Not even sure if I'll still be in UK then or what.

[suntsu]

i m interested.

[zaxx]

I'm interested too

[sortedmush]

I'm interested. Depending on work.

Excellent promotional idea!

[mintymark]

Yes, very interested.  I can see a bunch of problems for the pub though, which we would have to help them with. And in the end these are problems with bitcoin (or any "new" currency)

You have to remember that in general pub owners work hard and do not much do software, will have never heard of bitcoin etc etc.
I mean, of course, we all work hard, what I mean is the pub owner is probably unlikely to spend much of his spare time familiarising himself with what bitcoin is, or want to!

So for them how would it work? Suppose we said attendees pay in advance and get a refund for unused credit, the pub needs to have a piece of software to do that for them.

It has to be simple enough for them to opperate and they have to trust it.

Imagine it crashed and they lost a days takings, or were unable to refund anyone, they would see that as a major problem, something in fact that they would probably want insurance against.

How would we provide that to them. (Given its us that wants them to put the event on.)

How does a pub "charge" someone for a drink?  They cannot even use their till for this, which they would normally do!

I think this will take more than 6 months to set up even if we find a pub willing to make some effort.

I think it is a very worthwhile thing to do.

[lumos]

I think this will take more than 6 months to set up even if we find a pub willing to make some effort.

WHAT THE FUCK

[mintymark]

I dont see why we shouldnt do both.

Of course I am not suggesting it would take 6 months to organise a pubcrawl, but to organise 1 or more pubs to accept bitcoins for payments for drinks might be harder. It would be nice to be wrong.

I think that accepting bitcoins is the important part of this. I do not even know how we would do this. (The bit coin side of things.)

[idev]

If its near London, im up for coming.

[suntsu]

Another vote for Sheffield.

[mintymark]

Vladimar,

I think this is the right approach.  Lets say the organiser, me or you, goes to the pub (I know many pubs with rooms wpuld be only too happy to give us their room free and provide bar staff) and we put down a deposit, more than the expected takings, at the end of the day they give the organiser the bitcoins and whatever is left of the deposit.

But the piece I cannot get my head round is this. Its easy for me to pay you ebay-style for something with bitcoins, its all done with email and emessages.  But really I cannot send and email and say I want a pint of bitter, and they respond, well, bitter is 3bitcoin, and you send 3 bitcoin, how do they even know its you when you finally walk up to the bar? One way would be for us to provide drinks tokens printed on site in response to bitcoin payments. Buts its dam clunky and makes me feel like a student again.

Perfect could be if I have bitcoin on my mobile with  Bluetooth and IR go up to X and receive his bitcoin address by handshake, send the bit coins by wifi in the normal way and I am "Identified" for the transfer of the phisical goods because I am the one standing right there. The phisical goods could be a voucher or the drink itself. Or could we do something with RF proximity? Not sure. It seems to me that bitcoins are not well suited for a phisical transaction, or that there is a piece missing , possibly a piece missing that I do not know about or understand.

Any further thoughts, vladimar. Anyone ?

[mintymark]

So, was thinking more about what this would look like, and realised that if we had an enhanced bitcoin client for the pub (or other vendor) to run with a few extra pages, this would all become really quite easy.
This works on the restaurant model.

1) The new client should have a page where you can add items and quantitites for a particular payment address, perhaps from a pre-entered list of items.
2) The client can print a list of these, and a total, along with the payment address. For an actual establishment, I think a printed bill works and is what people are used to.
3) Once payment in full is received of the amount on the list, the bill is closed and a receipt can be printed.

Its even possible that this piece of software can use the existing hooks into the client.
Ideally the extension should be capable of running accross several clients so that in a large establishment any member of staff using a screen can close or add to any order, but this is not essential.

[lumos]

if you are expecting to meet miners, expect chris hansen

[mpkomara]

Revival of the thread--

1) We are meeting August 6th in London
2) There will be a pub that accepts bitcoins that hosts the meetup, making the meeting the first of its kind.  If you think you can be the host, respond to this thread.  Position still available!
3) If you are interested in attending, just add a little something clever to the thread.