Blogs & Articles: Lightning in the Wild: Nuthin’ but (Lightning) Net! 🔗 2 years ago
- Category: Blogs & Articles | Breez Technology - Medium
- Author(s): Roy Sheinfeld
- Published: 25th January 2022 12:57
Snowballs are fascinating. As they roll downhill, their surface area increases, allowing them to collect even more snow at a faster rate. And as they collect more snow, their mass increases, raising their velocity, increasing the rate of accumulation still further. The “snowball effect” isn’t a cliché; it’s an exciting example of a dynamic object in the field of comparative kinetics!
The basic point of the snowball effect, though, is simple: there’s a positive feedback loop. The bigger a snowball grows, the faster it’s able to grow.
The Breez Point-of-Sale is the snow, and the snowball is growing. Starting with (golf ball-sized) street merchants, it has since attracted (baseball-sized) local businesses in diverse regions and sectors. Size, mass, and velocity are increasing. Next, we might expect recognized national brands. Basketballs, if you will.
Today we’d like to introduce our latest POS users, who practically collapse the ball-growth metaphor into literal speech. Meet ratiopharm Ulm, a top-ranked team in the German national basketball league, who are helping to define the future of commerce in sports by adopting Lightning.
See all those fans? The team is kind of a big deal. (Image: Daniel Mattes)
It all starts with the plebs
Never forget that bitcoin was built and launched not by a national government, nor an international organization, nor a global conglomerate. It was launched by some genius with an idea of historical importance and built by people like us. And you.
Bottom-up, grassroots growth will outperform and outlast astroturfing every time. This conviction has served us well so far, and it is how we will win.
ratiopharm Ulm is yet another example of how effective grassroots action can be. They didn’t onboard themselves; they have Bitcoin-im-Turm to thank for that. Bitcoin-im-Turm is a local, 250-member bitcoin club that runs a Lightning ATM, their insanely cool #satoshi12 cocktail bot, and a local monthly meetup. But they wanted more. As Pierre, one of the club’s organizers, told us:
In summer 2021, we wrote a project plan for the Ulm4cleverCity initiative, aiming to make Ulm the first Bitcoin city in Germany, where Bitcoin would be widely accepted in local stores.
It’s hard to overstate the vision in that single sentence. Before Bukele made his move, these guys were actively trying to onboard their city. After the bitcoin revolution, we’ll be erecting statues of people like this.
The club didn’t just make themselves a node in the local bitcoin network, they also kept their ears to the ground, open for new opportunities:
We from the club contacted the ratiopharm Ulm CEO and marketing team when we heard that they were partnering with a German crypto exchange, which indicated their affinity for Bitcoin. And a newspaper article about our grant application put us on their radar too.
And dig the pitch. This is how you do it:
To demonstrate Lightning’s ease of use, we brought a real, functioning Lightning ATM with us to the first meeting. We onboarded them with a live demo purchase that went like this:
Install wallet 🠮 insert fiat into ATM 🠮 transfer BTC to wallet 🠮 pay Breez POS from wallet.
It worked so smoothly, they almost missed that the payment had even happened.
That first meeting showed we were a good fit for each other.
That’s it. Don’t tell me. Show me. (*stares at camera, breaks fourth wall*: and the point of Lightning in the Wild is to show you, dear reader, how the Lightning economy can work and already does).
Speaking of showing, check out this remarkably professional promo video (in German):
https://medium.com/media/cd4d3b384da20356b8517c7a493cad9b/href
Breez Breaks Basketball Bundesliga Bitcoin Barriers
Upon seeing that fateful demo, the team decided to accept Lightning in their FanCafé on the “Orange Campus,” where fans can go to buy merch or have a coffee and revel in their fandom.
When we saw the team’s FanCafé using the Breez POS in that video, we had to ask why they chose us. According to Simon, another of the brains behind Bitcoin-im-Turm, a number of features in the Breez POS won over the team’s management:
First, Breez is an easy-to-use POS terminal that allows users to upload their item catalog as a .csv file. Second, the ratiopharm management liked the receipt-like, printable purchase records because they’re useful for tax events. It’s also no surprise that they considered the manager password a major advantage for their retail store where more than one person is responsible for checking out purchases. Further, there is no third-party payment processor, so there are fewer fees to pay and points of attack to worry about. And finally, Breez provides Lightning ⬌ on-chain interoperability.
That second point about records and tax events is something we frankly don’t make much noise about, but our merchant users do mention it frequently. In telling us about what other Lightning solutions they considered, our friends in Ulm mentioned it again (along with our frictionless UX):
Breez is very easy to set up and start using at checkout … but bookkeeping also is very important in Germany, and it’s very easy to perform with Breez too.
For a country that produced Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kurt Gödel, and Emmy Noether, is it any surprise that they take math *very seriously*? And is anyone surprised that we — businesspeople ourselves — do what we can to make the lives of other businesspeople easier? After all, it’s part of our business.
Paying It Forward
The Lightning economy doesn’t just grow from the bottom up; it also grows laterally too, from one person, one business, one use case to another. Breez might provide easy-to-use tools, but it’s the thought, creativity, and commitment of existing users that spread Lightning.
ratiopharm Ulm is no exception. A club of bitcoiners onboarded a CEO in that first meeting, and the CEO onboarded managers:
One of the team’s communication managers told me [i.e. Simon] about how excited he is to play an early part in this realistic vision of the future.
…. the managers onboarded staff …
The feedback so far has been very positive. The staff at the FanCafé seems utterly infected.
During an ongoing pandemic, I might suggest ‘electrified’ as a better choice of words (get it? Lightning … electrified?), but ‘infected’ does capture Lightning’s … er … viral potential.
Of course, an enthusiastic staff is the best means to onboard customers. As we saw with Victoria Kayak, though, management also got creative and devised an incentive program:
The first 20 customers who pay with Lightning in the FanCafé receive a 25€ voucher for Bison, a German crypto exchange.
In other words, use Lightning, and they’ll basically give you a free t-shirt from the team’s merch collection or 4% of a team-branded Bang & Olufsen video conference set! Now that’s some merch!
Actions speak louder than words
For those who don’t know, Ulm is located in the German region of Swabia, and the Swabians are known to be kind of like German Scotsmen: they’re thrifty, they have recipes for how to cook some delicious tripe, and they don’t waste words.
When we asked our new fans in Ulm what the process of implementing Lightning in a retail context has taught them and what knowledge they would like to pass on to others, they lived up to their reputation for being terse. Their advice:
Start quick. It’s easier than you think.
That’s it. The only thing we could possibly add is that we have a wiki guide for merchants who are ready to take that step with the Breez POS.
TL;DR: Start quick. It’s easier than you think.
Want to know more about the cutting edge of southern Germany’s bitcoin scene and the people there building the Lightning economy? Check out their Twitter.
Lightning in the Wild: Nuthin’ but (Lightning) Net! was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
