The hippest spot it town

I’ve been meaning to post about a really cool business I found on btcmap.org a little bit ago. It’s a restaurant with great food, a hilarious theme, and a friendly, witty staff. They got on the map by lighting up their square terminal, but the owner turned out to be a real bitcoiner.

Now I’m glad I never did write that post, because I really want to write this post today, and I don’t want to turn y’all off to this really cool spot. Also, in the event that I haven’t doxed what city I currently live in yet, I’m going to try to preserve that a little longer.

Lightning Strikes, and not the bitcoin enabled kind!

So last night, I was at the afformentioned spot. I bought a meal, paid in bitcoin, and joyfully ate it up in a hurry. I went back to the counter for a beer.¹ The guy rings me up at the Square terminal and I pull out my phone. The QR code isn’t reading. After a moment it starts to get awkward. Then, with surgical precision, the clerk cancels the order right as the payment goes through. I get a nice green payment sent screen with all the trimmings: payment hash, preimagine, date and time, and a description with the merchant’s name as a cherry on top.

Ruh-roh. I see the owner now standing behind the clerk eyeballing the scene. I lay my phone out on the counter because I know those funds are gone and I want to make sure they understand it to. They need to look in their system and see what happened, and they do. The owner is starting to become noticeably upset while the clerk just keeps saying it didn’t go through. I’m say that my funds definitely left my wallet. There’s no doubt of that. On there end, the transaction is still listed as voided and they also definitely don’t have the payment.

A Midwest Standoff

I’ve travelled enough to know that the stereotype of “nice” midwesterners is overblown. There are nice folk everywhere and jerks lurking everywhere too. That said, as a general rule, one is more likely to encounter the following account right where it took place than any of the other places I’ve ever been.

They know for certain that they don’t have the money. They don’t know if I’m trying to scam them. I know for certain that neither I nor they have the money. So, we both err on the side of deference…to the point of conflict. They don’t want me to have a bad view of their business (not a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening) and I don’t want to sour their view of bitcoin. Things were already awkward. It actually kind of gets ugly. We’d be better off with a jerk in the mix.

I pay again win the fight!

They concede reluctantly, and let me pay again. Apparently bitcoin had crashed during the argument, as my second payment was two sats more than the first! That said, this freak incident probably didn’t hurt their view of bitcoin too much due to my savvy midwestern deference skills.² It wasn’t bitcoin’s fault after all. In fact, bitcoin was flexing one of it’s greatest features: censorship resistance. There was no way for me to claw back the payment.

And therein lies the rub! The real failure here had to do with Square’s infrastructure. Now, they’re doing experimental things and this is a really freak situation. But the problem lies in the fact that my payment wasn’t to the merchant. It was to Square! I’ve got the preimage to prove that the payment went through. They’ve got the big ol’ hole in their Square ledger to show that it it didn’t make it. I’d complain to square, but I wasn’t their customer in this whole rigamarole. The merchant was, but I think both Square and myself are willing to go to great lengths to ween this merchant off of war tokens.

SOOOO…

I figured stacker news was a nice place to share this account. Square should probably have a better contingency for this type of situation. I know they got the money. If you’re a Square employee and see this post, I’m happy to provide the preimage. I also know it wasn’t malicious.

It just seems that somewhere somebody in Square hopefully should be seeing that a payment came in for that merchant (their name is in the description of the payment) and get those funds to the right place, even if the payment was technically voided.

https://stacker.news/items/1494838