Impressions from our weekend trip to Milano and the 1st Byteball meetup.

Why Milano?

In January I decided to do a weekend trip in March. Thinking about which city to go, I remembered that there is something very cool going on in Milano in the Crypto world.

Milano was chosen as a Beta test for the distribution of Bytes (a Cryptocurrency) in physical stores. More about Obyte and this Beta test later.

First things first: How to find an accomodation that accepts Crypto payments?

When thinking about what accomodation to book, I asked in the Byteball Slack about recommendations of accomodations that accept Bytes.

Very shortly after, we had a great B&B that accepted Bytes as payment 🙂

Thanks to Edmond for organizing this and thanks to our host Giulio for a great stay!!

How is the Bytes distribution experiment in Milano working?

Bytes are the native currency of the Obyte platform, a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based Cryptocurrency. More about Obyte here.

99% of all Bytes are distributed for free!

Why that? The lead developer Tony decided for an initial fair and free distribution instead of an ICO in order to achieve mass adoption of the Obyte platform.

One of the distribution methods is the merchant cashback program.

Every store that is part of the Obyte cashback program can offer its customers 10% cashback in Bytes. The 10% is payed by Obyte in bytes, so the merchant has a strong incentive that he can offer his customers.

Furthermore, if the merchant accepts Bytes as payment, the customer even gets 20% cashback payed by Obyte.

I tried both options in Milano, and it worked perfect and very fast.

1st Obyte Crypto Meetup

The 1st Obyte meetup was held in a very cool new place in Milano, called „Dasein“.

The place also accepts payment in Bytes – 20% Cashback guaranteed 🙂

During the meetup Bytes were distributed for free to all participants (~20 people), so that they could experience paying in Bytes at the end of the meetup. Cheers to Marc de Mesel and a big thank you for sponsoring 1 GBYTE for this and for your ongoing support of Obyte!!!

Edmond gave a presentation about the status and experience so far with the ongoing Obyte distribution beta test in physical stores.

Edmond is the driving force behind the Obyte experiment in Milano. He is an inspiring and enthusiastic leader in making Obyte a success. Even if you are not into Crypto, you should definetely check out his restaurant (that of course also accepts bytes as payment) – we had lunch and dinner there 3 times during our stay and it was delicious everytime 🙂

There are now already more than 30 stores in Milano either part of the cashback program or also accepting Bytes as a payment. Here is an overview about all the stores that are part of it (will be updated soon with a complete list).

The acceptance so far is good and the merchant list is growing more and more.

Besides that several small companies now got Obyte Logos on their working clothes to further increase visibility.

Edmond also made a big announcement:

There will be a local exchange that converts Bytes to Euro soon! That makes it even easier for the stores to accept Bytes, as they can easily exchange it to Euro offline. This will further push the acceptance of bytes as a method of payment in Milano.

Paying with bytes is very easy:

The merchants that accept Bytes are using a small html file where they just insert the price in Euro.

Then a QR code is generated and with 2 more clicks in my Obyte App (scanning QR code, confirm payment) the payment is done. Also the cashback part is easy. You just bring the invoice of a Cashback merchant to a distribution center, like Edmonds restaurant, and with 2 clicks you get the cashback to your Obyte wallet.

More about Obyte

Checkout this Reddit post and the wiki news summary!

All in all:

If you like to do city trips, love good food and have an interest in Crypto, Milano is definitely something for you!