This Lee restaurant is now accepting bitcoin to pay for meals. Here's how that works
Gilbert Clerget, who owns and operates Café Triskele alongside his wife, was eager to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment at his establishment. By accepting bitcoin, Clerget both avoids credit card fees and gives the cafe another way to be visible to customers.
NATE HARRINGTON — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLELEE — After enjoying a nice meal at Café Triskele, you can now either pay with credit card, cash or bitcoin.
Café Triskele, at 150 Main St. in Lee, is the first restaurant to accept cryptocurrency as payment in Berkshire County. However, more retailers could soon follow, as point-of-sale platforms begin to make crypto compatible with their systems.
Cryptocurrency is a digital, decentralized form of money that is traded via blockchain, which is a digital ledger held across multiple computers that keeps track of transactions. The layers of redundancy while recording transactions are intended to safeguard the currency, and the digital aspect allows anyone to put money in crypto.
Crypto also acts like a stock, gaining and losing value based on the volume of transactions a given token sees.
As the digital currency has spread beyond its niche appeal, more people are accepting crypto as a valid form of payment. For the most part, this has been limited to online platforms only accepting the most established digital coins, like bitcoin, one of the first crypto tokens.
But companies like Square, which more than 200,000 stores in the United States use for their point-of-sale system, have begun adding bitcoin to the list of options when customers check out.
Gilbert Clerget, who owns Café Triskele with his wife, sees the new way to pay as a win-win, as paying in Bitcoin circumvents credit card charges and offers a new way for the restaurant to attract customers.
"It's a kind of a new method of payment that's coming," Clerget said. "Financially, it's like anything else."
Customers at Café Triskele can now pay with Bitcoin instead of cash or card. After choosing to pay in the cryptocurrency, customers will receive a QR code to scan with their crypto wallet — more or less a cryptocurrency bank account — which will prompt the payment automatically.
NATE HARRINGTON — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLEWhen Square started offering bitcoin compatibility, Clerget was eager to add the option to his restaurant.
Although the digital currency has many detractors, Clerget compared Bitcoin's trickle in to retail locations to the initial tepid acceptance of credit cards and other forms of digital payment.
"It's like paying with your phone, with Apple Pay," he said. "It's that for the next generation."
Right now, three stores in Berkshire County accept bitcoin, according to Bitcoin Cities, with the other two stores being Solomon's Furniture and Berkshirecat Records.
For customers, the process is simple: Select the option to pay with Bitcoin, scan the QR code from the digital wallet — which functions more or less as a person's crypto bank account — and then pay.
Right now, a single bitcoin is valued at $71,789, but people can hold parts of a coin. If a customer were to pay for a $100 meal using the crypto option, they would spend 0.00139 of a bitcoin.
The conversion from bitcoin to a U.S. dollar happens automatically, and the retailer accepting the crypto payment can choose whether to receive cash for the transaction or keep the bitcoin the customer paid with.
That choice is one of the reasons Clerget was excited to adopt the new form of payment, as he could collect bitcoin and let the asset appreciate, he said.
Retailers that accept bitcoin are also visible on a map with other business accepting cryptocurrency. Café Triskele is the first restaurant in Berkshire County to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment.
NATE HARRINGTON — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLEPaying in bitcoin also circumvents Massachusetts stringent credit card surcharge laws, Clerget said. "We can actually give like a 3.5 percent discount because we don't have any credit card fees."
Restaurants and other retailers in Massachusetts cannot explicitly add a credit card fee surcharge to a bill, but they often adjust their pricing to account for the 1.5 to 3.5 percent purchase fee business incur on credit card transactions.
- By Clarence Fanto, The Berkshire Eagle
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3 min to read
Retailers using Square who opt-in to accepting bitcoin also appear on a specific crypto compatible map, Clerget said. "It's like a secondary map for business, and I think it gives us some exposure that we don't have with Google or any other platform."
More Berkshire County businesses are likely going begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment too, Clerget said, party because Square is one of the most widespread point-of-sale company and partly because crypto is becoming more accepted.
Although no customers have paid using bitcoin yet, he said, "I believe it's the beginning of something big, and to be part of it is kind of cool."
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