Buy beer with Bitcoins?

Bar in Woolloomooloo Sydney to be Australia's first pub with Bitcoin acceptance.

[caption id="attachment_1872" align="alignleft" width="316"] Old Fitzroy Hotel proprietor Garry Pasfield is taking Bitcoins as payment for beers Source: News Limited[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1873" align="alignright" width="225"] What the froth is a Bitcoin?[/caption]

 

 

 

 

 

On Sydney's harborside, Old Fitzroy Hotel now allows anyone with a smartphone and bitcoin wallet to pay their tab with Bitcoins: Wave of the future, my friends, slow moving tsunami of change.

Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 by a mysterious programmer known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, which is thought to be a pseudonym, and who has never given an interview.

Beers should cost customers around 0.05 bitcoins, the equivalent of $7. But the price of your bitcoins can change over time as we can see here, so some days it might be cheaper... or more expensive depending on the market (which makes you sound smart).

Let us not debate the ups and down of a purely fictional digital currency and just get on with it. If you own a business, hesitate not! Installing bitcoin software requires no more modification than ensuring a workable WiFi system.

Bitcoins are great for computer geeks, international travelers and people looking to keep their spending pattern a secret. What better way attract interesting clientele?

Beercoin

An interesting experiment done by some SF geeks who set out to start a bitcoin spending surge with beer driven coins.

[–]em-an-re-su from Reddit explains:

"The payment flow worked like this:Get a ticket from the organizers, which was a piece of paper with a QR code of a bitcoin address (along with an illegibly small ascii version). Pay 1.1 bitcoin to that address with whichever software you want (or convince another attendee to pay to that ticket). Go to an organizer at the bar and give them the ticket. They had software that scanned the ticket and verified the account had 1.1 bitcoin. I think it used blockchain.info for verification. Then they'd tell the bartender to give you a beer of your choice.Most people used the android bitcoin wallet. I saw a couple of people using intersango.com, and a few used the blockchain.info javascript wallet. I heard one guy had their own proprietary web app wallet.I saw some people selling prepaid tickets for dollars.There were also normal patrons unaware of the event, as well as a few event hecklers who knew but refused to use bitcoin on the grounds that it is a waste of time or a pyramid scheme or whatever. No bitcoin event is complete without the hecklers."

How and where

If you want to see what it takes to go from zero bitcoins to a beer in hand, then swing through this International Business Times article: how to buy drinks with digital money, following a man on a #Beer4Bitcoin mission. It isn't as easy to start a bitcoin account as one might hope, but once you are an established net nerd then the possiblities (could) be endless! (Until bitcoins fall apart.) (Cross your fingers.)

Here is a bar in NYC that is accepting bitcoins

Parking Bar in Warsaw might take your money and give you drinks, if you come in as a group.

Or just check out the real world bitcoin map here.

 

@TastingNitch the @haymakerscam pub in Cambridgs takes bitcoins :-) (or it did a while back, not sure if they still do).

— Yvan (@ale_is_good) September 29, 2013

What else can you use to buy beer?

One time I traded a subway card with all the stamps for a Ninkasi Tricerahops.

Have you ever used something besides money to gain a brew? And I don't mean festival tickets, ya lug.

Nitch finishing the day kicking back some boring ol' money purchased beer and waiting for the days when beer backed currency will arrive. 

XOXO