My First Bitcoin Coffee
My expedition in the Netherlands had a few leisure activities too apart from all the exhaustive house search. As an avid cryptocurrency advocate, part of the plan was to find the one the café that accepted Bitcoin in Amsterdam — Wijs en Zonen, recommended by a redditor, 4 years ago. The mission was to buy my first Bitcoin coffee.
A nice looking young woman served me the black coffee, which was well brewed and had very good taste. I enjoyed it with only a pinch of sugar, no milk. The cup was as small as cup in a little girl's tea party. No, all the cups in all the Netherlands were absurdly tiny, and it is very Finnish habit to drink a lot of coffee from very big cups. It is statistically a fact that Finns consume coffee the most, than any other nation, proven by scientific methods of course. But I digress.
The café’s layout had a nice design. There were four premises you could sit and enjoy your food: one outside and three inside. They all had different vibes to them. Overall very cozy, and relaxing, warm atmosphere.
The feeling of purchasing the coffee with Bitcoin wasn't that special, albeit thinking it afterwards more deeply and in-depth arouse new thoughts in me. Because paying with Bitcoin was very abstract, nonexistent even, yet so very real, authentic and futuristic. For when you buy something with cash, you can feel the paper in your hand. With your card, you know you have that money in your bank, which is transferable to cash, but now you have a piece of plastic that you feel instead. Whereas with Bitcoin, you have your smartphone, but you are not able to change bitcoins into a physical representation of itself. It is very abstract money that way. Not to mention the whole abstractness of the concept 'money' itself.
In practice, paying with Bitcoin was extremely easy. First, open the wallet app and get ready to scan the merchant's QR-code. Then scan it, send it and you're done. Easy, simple and fast.
Technically, Bitcoin transactions take very long, but this experience was telling the opposite. I have no clue what kind of new technology the POS-device was using, because the transaction went through quickly. I suppose the device did not stay to wait for confirmations, but rather just checked if I had the sufficient balance at that particular moment, and then broadcasted the transaction to the network to wait for confirmations.
I guess that's what Andreas Antonopoulos meant when he said that Bitcoin is a dumb network: that way you can innovate at the edge of the network. From his videos: