Breez’s Point-of-Sale Mode: A New Tool for the Day after Tomorrow
By: Roy Sheinfeld
Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Point Of Sale, Payments, Lightning Network

Nobody asked for Corona or COVID-19 or whatever you want to call it, but it’s here. We’re all doing our best to deal with it. Our political and financial leaders are doing their best too. In order to staunch the spread, they’ve immobilized the meatspace economy. And in order to cushion equity and jobs from that blow, they’ve turned to a familiar tactic, a tool they think they understand: printing money. Lots of money.

Europe is printing 750€ billion, the UK is printing £200 billion, the Fed is printing ̶$̶7̶0̶0̶ ̶b̶i̶l̶l̶i̶o̶n̶ (Strike that. It’s from last week. Greenbacks are now to be printed in unlimited quantity. ~gasp~), and that’s just three currencies. And it’s just over the last week. More is yet to come.

I’m not trying to kick banking officials when they’re down. They’re just doing what they know, and they’re worried too.

But there’s hope. More than hope, there are certainties. We can be certain that this too shall pass. We may be naked apes without awesome claws or fins or wings, but we have science and tech. This virus is no match for our armies of geeks in labs. Thank heavens for them.

The white lab coat is the new mask & cape combo. (Wikipedia)

Another certainty is — you guessed it — bitcoin. Soon the world will be looking back on the necessary evils of social distancing and quantitative easing. Streets and shops will go back to their usual bustle, and bitcoin is going to be looking pretty good. Bitcoin is what a free economy and a free world needs. And the more people hold bitcoin, the more they will spend bitcoin, and the more people are spending bitcoin, the more they will need to use Lightning.

Lightning needs to be ready. Laying the foundation for the day after tomorrow, when this surreal situation will have faded into a memory, is how we at Breez are trying to contribute, along with many others in the Bitcoin community. So that’s what we’re doing. (You can only watch Silicon Valley reruns a finite — but very high — number of times anyway.)

Giving merchants the tools to bounce back

All of Lightning has basically been in extended beta for the last three years or so. While we might not yet feel ready for general availability, our tech might be in general use sooner than we ever expected. When stores re-open and customers have shifted to bitcoin, merchants need to be able to accept it.

Like an understudy who expected to have much more rehearsal time, Lightning will have to perform, and we’ll have to wow the crowd. A star will be born.

Our basic, P2P wallet shines. Thousands of Breez users have completed countless transactions safely and conveniently. But aside from, say, splitting the occasional restaurant bill (the good old days!) or receiving Lightning cashbacks from Fold, most users spend often while receiving relatively few payments. Ordering pizza (or toilet paper?), buying gift cards, or playing Lightning games online are the typical use cases, not selling a pizza or a new user subscription — yet.

Merchants are still out there. When their shops re-open, they’ll be receiving many payments and sending few. Merchants who’ve used our existing beta have helped us learn how to serve them better. What they want is an app that makes it as easy to receive bitcoin for a sale as it is to send bitcoin for a purchase. Fiat is busy undermining itself, so merchants need a tool to flourish in the coming Lightning economy.

That’s Breez’s Point-of-Sale mode: an app that transforms from a Lightning wallet into a Lightning cash register with the slide of a finger.

Soon her customers are going to re-emerging and craving a good coffee, and they’ll want to pay in bitcoin. (Wallpaper Flare)

Yes, some members of the Lightning community have already released merchant-focused solutions. But we’re creating a solution that satisfies our two sacred criteria: a dead-simple, Breez-y UX and, of course, non-custodial, bitcoin-worthy technology.

We can build an app that meets this standard, as our users will tell you. The challenge is simply to adapt the functional, market-defining Breez wallet to a broader palette of vertical use cases (that’s CEO-speak for “turn our wallet into a cash register”). So in order to better serve merchants and to prepare for Lightning’s next major push, we’ve been experimenting with a point-of-sale app: a frictionless, trust-minimized, mobile cash register for Lightning.

Introducing Point-of-Sale mode