Paying with Bitcoin where there's rush

[BlackHatCoiner]

Today, while I was shopping, I surprisingly witnessed a young teen (around 16-17) who asked the supermarket cashier if the operators think of accepting cryptocurrencies nowadays that it's being a "thing", which is kinda unusual in my areas; I don't know about you, but Bitcoin isn't even in the threshold of being considered an investment where I live, let alone a currency. He got a negative response.

This made me thoughtful. What happens when you want to pay with Bitcoin where there's rush, say a long queue of people which happens to be the case pretty often at supermarkets? On-chain is definitely not an option as you want from the transaction to take few seconds, so the next customer can push their products up. However, Lightning can become such a hustle when you want to transfer the equivalent of 200-300 EUR. Just to think that an issue with routing or capacity occurs while others wait for you, scares me.

The only thing that comes to my mind is to accept unconfirmed transactions with disabled RBF. Now, whether the amount is decent to pay a miner half of it for double-spending is another thing to discuss. It's not ideal and I'm sure those few-seconds-interval cryptos will find their way to attract by taking advantage of this "unfortunately sounded" problem. 

[Lanatsa]

Sending out wouldnt really be a problem but waiting for at least 1 confirmation does because making out the things get paid already via unconfirmed transaction would really be that risky for that business owner yet there's

always a tendency for double spend which i do agree that some altcoins do already solve out this kind of problem which im not really that surprised that adoption on terms of payment system would really be that still in

doubt because of this scenario.This would totally slow down the total operation or flow on times like this unlike with having fiat which you could simply give out then wait for the change.

[hosseinimr93]

The only thing that comes to my mind is to accept unconfirmed transactions with disabled RBF. ......

This depends on your risk management.
Even if you only accept fiat, there's always the possibility that someone give you fake cash or pick up the good and run away from your shop.
I don't think accepting non-RBF unconfirmed transactions is much risky if there isn't a big amount of money involved.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Even if you only accept fiat, there's always the possibility that someone give you fake cash or pick up the good and run away from your shop.

There are money checkers that can detect fake cash. You should not even attempt it in a supermarket as there are cameras everywhere. Besides, not getting your transaction confirmed isn't necessarily done on purpose and even worse: You can't know if it's done on purpose. It's a function of the system.

[BIT-BENDER]

Some of those mall, or human necessity services do not know how Crypto-currency, or are overwhelmingly scared to try it. There was a news of this guy in my location he owns a night club and some group of guys patronized him, and consumed huge amount of drink and they where insisting on paying with Bitcoin, what ever is it they did I am suspecting cancellation of transaction, the owner of the club who so an incoming transaction couldn't wait for confirmation before letting them off had a great loss because the crypto never reflected the gravity of this story has caused many to complete remove it from their thoughts

[Accardo]

Some of those mall, or human necessity services do not know how Crypto-currency, or are overwhelmingly scared to try it. There was a news of this guy in my location he owns a night club and some group of guys patronized him, and consumed huge amount of drink and they where insisting on paying with Bitcoin, what ever is it they did I am suspecting cancellation of transaction, the owner of the club who so an incoming transaction couldn't wait for confirmation before letting them off had a great loss because the crypto never reflected the gravity of this story has caused many to complete remove it from their thoughts

Bitcoin is used for crime and it'll scare a lot of people away from accepting bitcoin just like the teenager Op called out that got a negative response. Actions like the one stated in your story won't help the adoption of bitcoin globally. And they had the money in BTC but, they deceived the vendor because he can't wait and if they were allowed to wait they will order more drinks. I don't know the level of the Vendor in crypto but, he would have suggested that they sell the bitcoin to a vendor that will send fiat to his Bank account.

[SFR10]

What happens when you want to pay with Bitcoin where there's rush, say a long queue of people which happens to be the case pretty often at supermarkets?

It depends... Does it still count if we use an indirect approach? If you're lucky enough to have a "functioning" BTCitcoin debit card, it'd be flawless.

Besides, not getting your transaction confirmed isn't necessarily done on purpose and even worse: You can't know if it's done on purpose. It's a function of the system.

That's true, but if the store owner offers it to recurring customers, then I think it's worth the risk.

[franky1]

well he brought up the topic. so lets deal with it

bitcoin is a digital currency. its not meant as a replacement of fiat, its meant as a side option. for people that want better security
imagine it as a savings account without needing a government ID to open an account
imagine it as a offshore family trust fund without the lawyers and bank managers

bank cards are known as 'pull payments' where by they need your banking details and name and all the security to pull funds. meaning this can be used maliciously later without your authorisation..
bitcoin is a push payment. once confirmed its done. no promises to settle later, no punishment, refunds/chargebacks. no respending or rebalancing.

bitcoin works perfectly when buying stuff that gets delivered later. i do grocery shopping, and other online orders with delivery and the merchant gets the confirms before boxing/bagging the goods up

for the retail store stuff. you can convert some coin to giftcard.
no need to lock funds up for a month preplanning all possible spending and then split it into different channels and then have to rebalance if certain nodes are offline or funds are in the wrong channel...
no need to put funds into exchanges and linking bank accounts and again planning spending habits days/weeks ahead

instead with real bitcoin (not altnet peg-locked to bitcoin) you simple decide you are going to starbucks. buy a giftcard as you leave the house and have the giftcard ready before you arrive at starbucks.

no need to pre-plan to lock up a month of value and hope that you can spend that value if all the utopian circumstances align right.
and hope the rest of the value wont be 'auto-pilot-route' spent by other partners your linked to.

with bitcoin you have full control. and only you have control of your funds. no partner co-signing. no lock-in's for lengthy periods. no 'will x-y-z be online and liquid' worries

just spend what you want when you want how you want without preplanning days/weeks ahead, no pre-requisut of someone else signing off on your decisions of how you spend your bitcoin.

ive personally done some grocery shopping online with bitcoin. and also been walking around (uk version) of walmart, filling my (trolley)shopping cart while getting a giftcard using bitcoin and simply paying as i reached the (till)cashier. no waiting around at the cashier desk annoying other shoppers.

oh and the alnet that relies on locking funds up to then peg faster payments of different units of measure. if using a legit piece of software requires waiting atleast 6 confirms before "funding locked". thus its not something you can simply jump in and out of at a whim

i can get a giftcard far faster then setting up an altnet channel

i used to use my debit card 3-5 times a day. now i use it maybe once every few months. but i do onchain purchases 3-5 times aday

[mk4]

Using centralized platforms is still the far easier solution for now, unfortunately. Through the likes of Cash App or something similar to Coinbase's off-chain instant transactions. I know this requires KYC, but yea I think we're not close to having Lightning being bug-free enough to be used in a mass scale.

[Poker Player]

I still believe until reality proves me otherwise that due to Gresham's law people are going to tend to spend what are garbage coins and save Bitcoin. That is not to say that no one is going to pay in Bitcoin, there are many daily Bitcoin transactions, and I do make small purchases from time to time, even though I am accumulating. What I mean is that if you have fiat and you have bitcoin it doesn't make much sense to spend a currency that tends to appreciate quite a bit and keep a currency that is devaluing by leaps and bounds.

Even if cryptocurrency payments became widespread, I think there would be some shitcoin that would be the main one used for day-to-day payments, and not Bitcoin. If we add to this the problems of confirmation time and the fact that LN does not seem to be a solution to scale all payments globally, even less so.

[so98nn]

There are ways to overcome these things. May be a good synch software that can catch up the broadcasted transaction immediately. I am not sure how many of you used Roobet casino, but whenever I press send button from my wallet within 20-30 seconds Roobet picks up the transaction right away. Its like instant deposit to the account.

I'm sure it won't be impossible thing to do in the supermarket store where millions of transactions goes on every month.

Surely, infra can be built for that so no need to be in line for this. Apart from this you can just get crypto currency debit or credit card and workout whole thing. 

[KaliLinux]

Some of those mall, or human necessity services do not know how Crypto-currency, or are overwhelmingly scared to try it. There was a news of this guy in my location he owns a night club and some group of guys patronized him, and consumed huge amount of drink and they where insisting on paying with Bitcoin, what ever is it they did I am suspecting cancellation of transaction, the owner of the club who so an incoming transaction couldn't wait for confirmation before letting them off had a great loss because the crypto never reflected the gravity of this story has caused many to complete remove it from their thoughts

Bitcoin is used for crime and it'll scare a lot of people away from accepting bitcoin just like the teenager Op called out that got a negative response. Actions like the one stated in your story won't help the adoption of bitcoin globally. And they had the money in BTC but, they deceived the vendor because he can't wait and if they were allowed to wait they will order more drinks. I don't know the level of the Vendor in crypto but, he would have suggested that they sell the bitcoin to a vendor that will send fiat to his Bank account.

I quite agree with you here but I will say that the club owner should have insisted that the guys wait until the transaction is complete since they were the ones that insisted on paying with bitcoin even if it takes 24hrs Why would more businesses want to accept bitcoin with this type of news when the people in the system are the ones sabotaging its adoption.

[Beparanf]

Regardless of the speed issue and security feature of the Bitcoin talk we have here. Volatility is what really the big issue and hindrance on why a physical store rarely accepts Bitcoin. You can easily pay the cashier in an instant by just handling over your cash in your wallet to the cashier, It will be a gamble too on there business when they will accept an asset that price can go up and down more than 10% on a single day. Imagine your business is working properly using fiat current system? Do you think you will still venture out on risky crypto world in terms of price volatility? I have a lot of business owner friends that has crypto investment but they are not implementing crypto to there business because they know how the price movement behave when there's trend so they usually just put money on it that they can afford to lose.

[Mauser]

This made me thoughtful. What happens when you want to pay with Bitcoin where there's rush, say a long queue of people which happens to be the case pretty often at supermarkets? On-chain is definitely not an option as you want from the transaction to take few seconds, so the next customer can push their products up. However, Lightning can become such a hustle when you want to transfer the equivalent of 200-300 EUR. Just to think that an issue with routing or capacity occurs while others wait for you, scares me.

I agree that bitcoins are not the most practical crypto currencies for fast every day shopping. While long queues are one thing in the supermarket, in my country the self check out became very popular. To quickly scan and leave will probably not be possible. There might some alternatives however. One would be that there are scanners now in the supermarket, so you can walk around and scan the items when putting them into your basket. Paying directly in the middle of the supermarket and then there could be a confirmation until you walk to your car and leave. Another thing could be that a mobile wallet works together with the supermarket chain and the wallet operator would guarantee the payment as long as there is enough coins on the wallet. Its like with credit cards. The supermarket doesn't directly get the money either when using a card. It takes some time for the actual money to be transfered. Only on paper they are instantly credited.

[_act_]

The only thing that comes to my mind is to accept unconfirmed transactions with disabled RBF. Now, whether the amount is decent to pay a miner half of it for double-spending is another thing to discuss. It's not ideal and I'm sure those few-seconds-interval cryptos will find their way to attract by taking advantage of this "unfortunately sounded" problem. 

Bitcoin may not be used to shop where there are many customers to buy from shops but bitcoin is good to be used when shopping online from your home or workplace, there are times you will have to consider using lighting network or just use altcoin like USDT on Tron blockchain which take just 1 minutes before it will be confirmed. There are many exisitng means this can be done.

It can be as a rules on the shopping mall that anyone that want to use bitcoin for payment should wait for 10 minutes and giving them instructions about the fee to be used to make their transaction get confirmed very fast and that it may take long than 10 minutes some times, but this may be difficult and would be better not to have even tried it because if not done well, it can lead to congestion of customers in the shopping mall.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The problem here is that people compare a credit card transaction being broadcast to a bitcoin transaction being confirmed, and then say bitcoin is too slow to use in person.

When I pay with a credit card:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 3-5 business days
• The transaction can be reversed for 180 days

When I pay with bitcoin:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 10 minutes
• The transaction can be reversed for 10 minutes

The two lines I have bolded are what people compare. Credit card transactions are hugely risky for the merchant. They don't receive any money for days, and the transaction be reversed for months. It is also almost trivial to reverse a credit card transaction. I can phone my card provider any time in the next 6 months and say my card was lost, stolen, skimmed, phished, whatever, and for a value of $200-300 most will reverse it without question. Compare this with how difficult and costly it is to reverse a non-RBF bitcoin transaction, which must be done within a time frame of only 10 minutes on average.

And yet, almost every merchant accepts credit card transactions and experiences minimal fraud.

Also, see this quote:

As a result, the vast majority of the security for unconfirmed transactions comes not from within the Bitcoin system, but from external factors such as the large numbers of honest Bitcoin users who would never attempt to defraud their vendors, the tolerance among vendors for small amounts of fraud, the ability (or threat) of vendors resorting to the legal system or other types of recourse, and other factors which have nothing to do with the design of the Bitcoin protocol.

All of these things hold equally true for opt-in RBF (and they’re not unlike the situation with credit card payments in the US, which are easily reversable for months after the exchange and yet which have fraud rates low enough that almost all significant merchants accept them).

[Kakmakr]

In my country most retailers accept Bitcoin and Crypto currencies through Payment processors.... which is not the way true Bitcoiners wants bitcoins to be used, but it is a temporary solution. They do this, because they are not allowed to accept Crypto currencies as legal tender, so they bypass those lose and they accept bitcoins through a payment processor.. that will convert it into Fiat. 

The Lightning Network is a better solution.... but as you said.. "a big hassle" for bigger amounts. I hope this will improve as adoption grow in the future. 

[BlackHatCoiner]

instead with real bitcoin (not altnet peg-locked to bitcoin)

Please don't, stop, leave the thread and get some help.

[...]

You're correct, but that's up to credit.

When I pay with cash:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately.
• The merchant receives the money immediately.
• The transaction is settled immediately and cannot be reversed.

I can phone my card provider any time in the next 6 months and say my card was lost, stolen, skimmed, phished, whatever, and for a value of $200-300 most will reverse it without question.

There has to be a question, otherwise we'd all use this method to avoid such expenses once a few months. Contrarily, in Bitcoin, there's absolutely no question nor intermediaries to address to. I'm not saying many would attempt to defraud their merchants that way, but I can imagine a smartass who'd pay off few miners every few weeks, just to avoid giving his allowance at the supermarket.

[fullhdpixel]

Bitcoin is used for crime and it'll scare a lot of people away from accepting bitcoin just like the teenager Op called out that got a negative response. Actions like the one stated in your story won't help the adoption of bitcoin globally. And they had the money in BTC but, they deceived the vendor because he can't wait and if they were allowed to wait they will order more drinks. I don't know the level of the Vendor in crypto but, he would have suggested that they sell the bitcoin to a vendor that will send fiat to his Bank account.

The best thing that the owner of the bar would have done is to ask them to stay back until their transactions has been confirmed at least three times. I guess maybe he’s someone who doesn’t have a clue as to how cryptocurrency works.

This is his business, so it shouldn’t be something that he should play around, you don’t go around and just hop into a bar to drink and insist on paying with Bitcoin when you know for sure that isn’t normal. So, the vendor made a mistake by letting them go, he should have insisted on either getting paid in cash or they will have to wait till their transaction gets three to six confirmations before they are allowed to leave.

If they had the time to sit down and drink as much as they want, then they should as well have the time to wait for their Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. If they refused, then he had right to call the police and get them arrested.

[o_e_l_e_o]

You're correct, but that's up to credit.

Cash is obviously the fastest and most final, but for a $200-300 grocery shopping far more people are paying with credit card or similar than are paying with cash. And every major retailer and the vast majority of smaller retailers still accept credit card with no issues whatsoever.

There has to be a question, otherwise we'd all use this method to avoid such expenses once a few months.

Well, if you keep doing it every few months, then your credit card provider will terminate your account. Just like if you claim your Amazon order didn't arrive once or twice they usually just send you a replacement, but if you do it constantly then your account gets terminated.

I'm not saying many would attempt to defraud their merchants that way, but I can imagine a smartass who'd pay off few miners every few weeks, just to avoid giving his allowance at the supermarket.

And once this person had defrauded the same supermarket two or three times, then said supermarket will ban them from their premises, just as they would if someone charged back their credit card multiple times or "accidentally" shoplifted multiple times.