The answer of course is “yes”, but let’s detail the reasons.
Suppose for sake of discussion you run a business with customers. You already have a way that your customers can pay you using credit cards, of course. It might be Square, it might be Stripe. Or you may use old-school dedicated credit-card swipe terminals. But one way or another, you are accepting credit cards.
Commissions. Just to use an arbitrary example, suppose your business is a wedding venue. From time to time, somebody rents out your facility to conduct a wedding. Let’s say the fee is ten thousand dollars.
If you take payment by credit card, the commission might be $260 or it might be $330.
- For a card-present payment, a typical commission is 2.6% or more, meaning a commission of at least $260.
- For a web-based payment, a typical commission is 3.3% or more, meaning a commission of at least $330.
Now let’s suppose you receive payment in bitcoin lightning. For this, the commission might be zero. Or it might be 1%. Let’s assume 1%. In that case, the commission would be $100. By the way, this is $100 regardless of whether the customer is standing in person at your cash register, or is on the other side of the globe tapping away at your web site.
I invite the reader to compare these numbers. I think you will agree that 260 and 330 are both bigger than 100.
To say this another way, the decision to accept bitcoin lightning might give you an extra $160 or even an extra $230 in pure profit.
Volatility. Now I know what you are thinking. Bitcoin is volatile. One day a bitcoin might be worth $70K, and the next day $65K, and the next day $75K. But it is easy to eliminate any volatility risk. If, for example, you are using Square to receive your bitcoin lightning payments, the default setting is that Square instantly converts the bitcoin to US dollars, and credits your account with that number of US dollars. If ten minutes from now the value of a bitcoin has changed, this does not affect the number of dollars you received.
Disputes. Some businesses are forced to deal with disputes, some of which are frivolous. The wedding is over, everyone has gone home, and all of a sudden a message comes in from your credit card processing service provider, letting you know that the customer has initiated a dispute. It seems the toilet paper in the bathrooms was (supposedly) not as soft and comfortable as the customer encountered during their initial visit prior to signing the contract. Or a beautiful potted plant that sat in a particular room on initial-visit day was missing on the wedding day. No matter what the merits of the dispute, you will spend many hours’ worth of your time dealing with it. Even if you “win” the dispute, you lose, because you had to spend many hours dealing with it. And some credit card processing service providers impose a dispute fee regardless of whether you “win” or “lose” the dispute.
Guess what? If you get paid in bitcoin lightning, a customer cannot initiate a frivolous dispute. (It isn’t a credit-card payment, and so the credit-card-style dispute mechanism is simply not in the picture.)
Chargebacks. Every now and then a business will get the bad news that a credit card payment was made with a stolen credit card, or was otherwise unauthorized for some reason. The credit card service provider reverses the payment, and probably tacks on a chargeback fee.
Guess what? This is impossible with bitcoin. Once you have the bitcoin payment, that’s it. You have the payment.
Having potential customers seek you out. It turns out that some people have bitcoin and they want to pay using bitcoin (by which we mean paying via bitcoin instead of ordinary non-bitcoin ways like cash or credit cards). Such a person might be considering, say, four wedding venues. Let’s suppose one of the venues accepts bitcoin lightning payments, and the other three venues do not accept bitcoin.
I can promise you that on this set of assumptions, the potential customer will very much go out of his or her way to select the venue that accepts bitcoin lightning payments.
Why do I keep saying “bitcoin lightning” rather than simply “bitcoin”? A first reason I keep mentioning “lightning” is that it is incredibly easy to set up, just a couple of mouse clicks in the admin page of your Square credit card web site.
A second reason is that bitcoin lightning is instant. A lightning transaction is a “sure thing” within seconds. This compares with the world of ordinary bitcoin where you might have to wait ten minutes or even some hours for a transaction to be “confirmed”.
Okay I’m sold. What do I do next? If you use Square, what you do next is two mouse clicks in the admin web page of Square. That’s it.
If you use a different point-of-sale system, get in touch with your POS service provider. They may have a simple turnkey solution for receiving bitcoin lightning.
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