At San Francisco’s Buyer’s Best Friend, a worker demonstrates the company’s custom-built bitcoin payments system. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Over the past year, it’s become a lot easier to buy bitcoin, thanks to services such as Coinbase. And thanks to retailers such as Overstock.com and TigerDirect, it’s now a lot easier to to spend them online. But there’s still one big pothole in bitcoin’s bumpy road to mainstream adoption: Your local coffee shop.
That’s because most cash register software still doesn’t support the world’s most popular digital currency. But the situation is about to change, according to Square CEO Jack Dorsey. He says that Square is building a register that will allow companies to accept bitcoin as well as Apple’s new contactless payment system, Apple Pay.
“We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can accept cash, so they can accept a cheque, so they can accept Bitcoin and so they can accept any form of payment that comes across the counter including future ones and burgeoning ones like Apple Pay,” Dorsey told the CBC this week, speaking at the opening of Square’s new Canadian offices in Kitchener, Ontario.
Reached Monday, the company didn’t have any word on when its bitcoin-ready register might be on the market. But it said say that it wants to support new types of payment systems. “Square sellers should never have to miss out on a sale. They should be able to accept any form of payment,” said Square spokesman Johnny Brackett.
Today, shops such as Buyer’s Best Friend in San Francisco and restaurants such as the Pink Cow in Tokyo accept payments in bitcoin. Basically, you hold your smartphone up to a scanner at the cash register. But such systems can be difficult for businesses to set up. Square, whose in-person payment systems are already used by so many businesses, could potentially make it much easier for small stores and restaurants to accept bitcoin, a new kind of currency that exists only on the internet.
Though many believe bitcoin can remake the way we handle money—removing some of the control traditional exhibited by big banks and government organizations—it is still a long way from reaching the mainstream. But with company such as Overstock now accepting bitocin payments across the globe and Square flirting with a bitcoin register, the currency is inching closer.
Home Page Photo: David Shankbone
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