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Bitcoin at the till: what merchants actually need
Accepting bitcoin in a shop is no longer an experiment – provided the basics are right: the appropriate payment rail per amount, no unnecessary middlemen, and receipts your bookkeeping can work with.
For small amounts the Lightning Network has become the standard: payments confirm in seconds and cost fractions of a cent. Larger sums belong on the base layer (on-chain), where confirmation takes minutes but is final. A good point-of-sale system picks the rail automatically.
With self-hosted software such as BTCPay Server the payment flow stays with the merchant: no third-party custody, no account freezes by a provider, optional instant conversion of the countervalue. The price is operational responsibility – hosting, updates, backups.
For the books, the receipt is what counts: amount, rate and countervalue in francs or euros at the moment of payment, cleanly exportable. And whoever accepts payments should screen incoming addresses automatically – more on that in our piece on CryptoWorkspace.