Bitcoin Merchant Onboarding

Merchants in El Salvador are broadly faced with two options, take payment in cash dollars or in Bitcoin. If they take payment in cash dollars then the customer will often leave them the change. I have been in El Salvador two weeks now and I am finding that the bitcoin payment process is rarely making it easy for me to leave a tip.

In the USA the POS terminals have been very effectively engineered to have the customer pay a tip. They screen is swivelled around to the customer, where they are presented with the 15, 20 and 25% options. There is an option for ‘no tip’, but this is very small and at the bottom of the screen. The system is set up so that the least friction option is to just pay a tip.

We need to have Bitcoin payment experiences where the customer is finding the least friction path is to pay a tip to the merchant. If we can do this then we will find that many more merchants will want to adopt bitcoin.