San Jose Sushi restaurant now accepts Bitcoin! (READY FOR BITCOIN 2013!!)

[MemoryDealers]

Just in time for the Bitcoin2013 conference,  Ocean Blue Sushi Club now accepts Bitcoin!
It is about a 15 to 20 minute drive from the conference location.

Come visit them today to show your support for the Bitcoin economy!

Ocean Blue Sushi
1010 E El Camino Real
Sunnyvale, CA 94087
(408) 720-8840

http://www.yelp.com/biz/ocean-blue-sushi-club-sunnyvale

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[Melbustus]

Perfect. Will check it out.

[Operatr]

Every new business Bitcoin adopter is a win for the movement 

[MemoryDealers]

Here is a photo of the Bitcoin sticker on the front door:








Lets show them that Bitcoiners love actually using their Bitcoins!

[Mike Hearn]

No way! That's literally right next to my hotel. I guess I know where I'll be eating tonight. Thanks Roger! 

[Mike Hearn]

I just finished being their first customer. The owner (I presume?) seemed very happy and took the opportunity to show her waitresses how it worked. Actually the waitress I got (Sarah) didn't know what Bitcoin was, but fortunately the owner overheard us talking

The food was delicious. They even gave me a free salad because they were a little slow on the service, although I honestly hadn't noticed any delay. The transaction itself worked fine. They're using something that appears to integrate with their point of sale system. They typed in a ticket number printed on my receipt to an Android tablet, and then it redirects to BitPay. But even though there were no problems, I can still see some small ways it could have been made even better. In no particular order:

• The PoS integration is a website. I don't know what website, I didn't recognise it. It doesn't seem to be tablet optimised and it does not use HTML5 markup on the ticket number input field, so the waitress had trouble typing in the ticket number as it had a full blown ASCII keyboard - marking the input as numeric will give a better soft keyboard on tablets.
• The transaction took around 15-20 seconds to get to BitPay and be accepted. This is OK compared with credit cards, but there's no technical reason it should be so slow, we should be able to get to the same confidence level within less than 500 milliseconds. To do that will require BitPay to deploy the payment protocol and an Android app that knows how to proxy a transaction to their servers where they can check it against their own Bitcoin node. Then we'll need to upgrade the Android wallet app to use the same mechanism.
• They have free wifi for customers, but I had to ask what the password was (I asked at the start of my meal so the final payment was fast). I can't use 3G because I'm roaming and anyway, reception inside was poor. Fixing this requires us to extend the payment protocol + Android wallet to support Bluetooth submission as Andreas and I prototyped last year.
• The BitPay invoice page didn't look tablet optimised and does not set a label on the bitcoin: URI. It'd be nice if the payment URI in the QRcode had the name of the restaurant in it. I don't think it'd have hurt scannability much, but even if it did, a tablet optimised version could have made the QRcode bigger.
• The Bitcoin Wallet app could use URI labels (if one had been set) to label addresses automatically. This is a dumb lack and I yelled at Goonie about it already :-)
• There needs to be a map of nearby Bitcoin accepting merchants integrated with my wallet. I'm not sure how I'd have discovered that the shop accepts Bitcoin if I hadn't spotted this thread today. We need someone to get really serious about mapping out merchants and make it their full time project, like how local trading didn't take off until localbitcoins.com.

[smoothie]

Cool I may have to check this place out while at the conference. 

[xavier]

Cool! I'll check it out tomorrow..

[Este Nuno]

• The PoS integration is a website. I don't know what website, I didn't recognise it. It doesn't seem to be tablet optimised and it does not use HTML5 markup on the ticket number input field, so the waitress had trouble typing in the ticket number as it had a full blown ASCII keyboard - marking the input as numeric will give a better soft keyboard on tablets.
• The transaction took around 15-20 seconds to get to BitPay and be accepted. This is OK compared with credit cards, but there's no technical reason it should be so slow, we should be able to get to the same confidence level within less than 500 milliseconds. To do that will require BitPay to deploy the payment protocol and an Android app that knows how to proxy a transaction to their servers where they can check it against their own Bitcoin node. Then we'll need to upgrade the Android wallet app to use the same mechanism.
• They have free wifi for customers, but I had to ask what the password was (I asked at the start of my meal so the final payment was fast). I can't use 3G because I'm roaming and anyway, reception inside was poor. Fixing this requires us to extend the payment protocol + Android wallet to support Bluetooth submission as Andreas and I prototyped last year.
• The BitPay invoice page didn't look tablet optimised and does not set a label on the bitcoin: URI. It'd be nice if the payment URI in the QRcode had the name of the restaurant in it. I don't think it'd have hurt scannability much, but even if it did, a tablet optimised version could have made the QRcode bigger.
• The Bitcoin Wallet app could use URI labels (if one had been set) to label addresses automatically. This is a dumb lack and I yelled at Goonie about it already :-)
• There needs to be a map of nearby Bitcoin accepting merchants integrated with my wallet. I'm not sure how I'd have discovered that the shop accepts Bitcoin if I hadn't spotted this thread today. We need someone to get really serious about mapping out merchants and make it their full time project, like how local trading didn't take off until localbitcoins.com.

Well, since BitPay just hired your fellow core dev jgarzik I expect we'll be seeing some major improvements with BitPay soon.

[teste]

About a map with places that accept bitcoin, we have www.coinmap.org that use data from www.openstreetmap.org
There's an feature request on bitcoin wallet android about map places, see: http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/issues/detail?id=121

[domob]

About a map with places that accept bitcoin, we have www.coinmap.org that use data from www.openstreetmap.org
There's an feature request on bitcoin wallet android about map places, see: http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/issues/detail?id=121

Cool, I didn't know there was already a project using OSM's payment:bitcoin=yes.  That's nice!  (I'm interested in OSM, too, and mapping for fun.  Unfortunately, I think in my wider neighbourhood there's still nothing to tag as accepting Bitcoins.

Regarding mobile map:  I'm using Osmand (http://www.osmand.net/) and am very satisfied with it in general.  It allows to show (offline!) OSM data, as well as routing and search for POIs.  So it would be perfect if one could simply add a POI search "accepts bitcoin" to it.  Then just show all places on a map, and let it walk you to the nearest one....  Or maybe one could integrate the Bitcoin wallet app with it?  I don't know.  Just some ideas and wishes.

[teste]

I really like OSMAND too, but it doesnt have an option to filter places with tag payment:bitcoin.
On OSMAND mailing list have a topic about it, see: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osmand/8dwH1jKsRqU/zUGqG0HMhukJ

[cypherdoc]

Cool I may have to check this place out while at the conference. 

weren't you the one complaining vociferously about the price a few months ago? 

maybe i'll see you there!

[domob]

I really like OSMAND too, but it doesnt have an option to filter places with tag payment:bitcoin.
On OSMAND mailing list have a topic about it, see: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osmand/8dwH1jKsRqU/zUGqG0HMhukJ

Ah ok.  But of course I already assumed that.  When I was behind osmand but not interested in Bitcoin (yet), I of course wouldn't include that tag into the compressed data format.  But maybe in the future (or with a suitable patch) that could be done.  I'm looking forward to it - honestly, at the moment it would not make that much sense yet ... I already know all places in my further neighbourhood just by looking at the map once, there aren't too many at the moment unfortunately.

[Mike Hearn]

Yeah it seems there are several map sites none of which have a complete list of merchants - I hope it gets resolved soon either with database syncs or one of them winning out and becoming the standard. It sort of sucks to have to check multiple sites. The OSM based solution seems to require you to use a full blown map editor to just annotate a business as accepting Bitcoin, that doesn't seem easy enough for local restaurant owners to bother with. It really needs to be one or two clicks I'd think.

The idea of auto-adding places through the act of actually making a payment is awesome. I hope someone steps up and either pays Andreas to implement that or writes the patch themselves (Android programming is fun, I hope someone joins in and helps Andreas out).

Some kind of gallery/merchant store would be nice also. So much to do!

[teste]

Yeah it seems there are several map sites none of which have a complete list of merchants - I hope it gets resolved soon either with database syncs or one of them winning out and becoming the standard. It sort of sucks to have to check multiple sites. The OSM based solution seems to require you to use a full blown map editor to just annotate a business as accepting Bitcoin, that doesn't seem easy enough for local restaurant owners to bother with. It really needs to be one or two clicks I'd think.

The idea of auto-adding places through the act of actually making a payment is awesome. I hope someone steps up and either pays Andreas to implement that or writes the patch themselves (Android programming is fun, I hope someone joins in and helps Andreas out).

Some kind of gallery/merchant store would be nice also. So much to do!

About an easy way to add places on coinmap, I agree with Mike. I have a post about this on https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175900.msg1838831#msg1838831