BackgroundBackground

Every single time I have tried to orange pill my normie friends, there’s the question “but how can I use it?” and honestly there isn’t a good answer to this yet. Saying that some fringe websites and a coffee shop accept it doesn’t make any difference, one could even say that it reinforces their argument that it’s pretty much useless. So tackling this issue is imho one of the most important things going on in the space. Square’s announcement last year was one of the best news in years and makes me extremely bullish for the future, this is how we win. Dorsey is one of my last heroes that bitcoin hasn’t slain.

I had a dream… to build a company that could emulate Square here in Colombia, but once you start on that path there are huge barriers with registration, banks, compliance and many other things non related to the product/service you’re trying to bring to the market. Not to mention the anti bitcoin position you’re in when you have to KYC clients just because they want to use magic internet money.

But I thought it was worthy and I built an LN node, I found some devs to get a website for that, and I was on the edge of getting all the compliance BS ready, I didn’t want to operate outside the law. Then I saw this tweet by @Calle #1414366 and it really hit. I always thought that wouldn’t be possible because of some time constraints, but as they’ve shown, if you don’t need instant payment, there could be a market between BTC P2P buyers and users that want to pay with LN on retail shops.

PaymentsPayments

The QR payments are ubiquitous here, when it comes to small shops, bars and restaurants, everyone has it. This is how cash is disappearing. Transaction costs are zero and everyone can have their own QR by just clicking something on their bank app, individuals and companies alike. All the infrastructure exists, so there shouldn’t be any more to build than the railways from users to BTC buyers. Moreover these type of payments are displacing debit and credit cards, it’s just cheaper and simpler to operate.

FOSSFOSS

As I understand @gandlaf21 is working on Openpleb which is a FOSS project for this, but the code on git seems to be a little quiet lately. There’s also what @plebqr is doing in Thailand and apparently it works pretty well there but the code is closed, not sure if the former is working with/for the latter…

I’d REALLY like to have this here in Colombia, it would open the door to thousands of shops that use it! I believe the best way would be to leave it open source, just as the lnp2pbot exists today and different devs contribute to it.

My dev skills are beyond “Hello world” but way below to undertake this project, so I would like to gather a team to build this.

What I can offer:What I can offer:

• My LN node that is well connected
• Funding… up to my possibilities, or manage to find what’s required from other sources
• Market depth to kickstart the project while more participants come. A buyer of last resort
• Everything local, I know the community here and would be able to promote among local bitcoiners, no need to talk to any merchant, no permits, no registration
• Write docs and teach newbs how to use it

If you think you have the skills to dev this project, please contact me, I’m open to propositions and willing to make this work.

My mail / lnurl is admin@bit2cash.net