Everyone who owns Bitcoin has the opportunity to pay this virtual currency to eat pizza thanks to Dubai's The Pizza Guys. This Bitcoin restaurant is the first of its kind in the Arab region, and Rami Badawi and his wife Amber Hayek opened it in February 2013 to embark on the bitcoin adventure early this year.
Badawi tells Raseef22 that the idea was born from the talk of one of the customers, Tariq Qaddumi, who repeatedly launched the Bitcoin MENA account on Twitter about this currency. He and his wife began to delve into the topic. "The more we read about it, the more we found the idea attractive, so we decided to give it a try."
Some people might think that it is a crazy idea, especially since this virtual currency is not yet viable and very volatile. However, Rami Badawi, the owner of the small restaurant, thinks the opposite. "If I were the owner of a large company, I would not have taken the risk." To Badawi and Hayek, it sounds like a social entrepreneurial venture waiting for other companies to take up. "We did not know what to expect from this experience, until we adopted Bitcoin and discovered that it was an easy currency."
The Pizza Guys' entry into the world of virtual currency goes back to two main reasons, Badawi explains, "When you look at our sales, you find that 20 to 35 percent of sales are made with credit cards, which means that we don't get paid immediately. For any company," Every day is important in terms of expenses because of salaries and bills ... Sometimes, we wait three days to get the money. But this problem does not exist with Bitcoin, we get our money as soon as the customer pays. "
As for the second reason, it relates to commissions of up to 2.5 percent on credit cards, while Bitcoin payment is free without additional costs. Badawi adds that Bitcoin also provides a benefit to consumers. Whenever they perform any banking transaction, personal information becomes available to almost everyone. As for dealing with Bitcoin, it "saves your personal information."
How does the payment process work?
It's a very easy process for Badawi, and only requires a mobile phone and a Bitcoin app. When the customer wants to pay in the virtual currency, the special application converts the dirham into a certain amount of "Bitcoin". Then it generates the QR code, which after reading it by mobile, allows the transfer and payment of the required amount.
After that, the restaurant converts the virtual currency into dirhams (if he wants, then Bedouin keeps the money in bitcoins!) Via an online transfer service. It should be noted that the default wallet is only available on phones that support the Android system, after Apple decided to withdraw this popular application, which had been downloaded 120,000 times within two years, until last February.
Badawi tells us that 12 customers, most of them young people, have paid with bitcoin since the launch of the service at The Pizza Guys. The number may seem small, but Badawi tells us that some cafes in New York have not reached this number of customers in a longer period of time, according to a worker at the Bitcoin company in New York. Despite Bitcoin's ease of use, this virtual currency is still relatively unknown, or not acceptable to many.
Controversial coin
The idea of Bitcoin goes back to 2008, when Satoshi Nakamato wrote a search for this currency, which he described as an electronic system based on peer-to-peer transactions, i.e. between one user and another without any intermediary. And put this currency into circulation for the first time in 2009 as a way to change the global economic system, especially as it relies on decentralization. The identity of Nakamoto, who appears to be a pseudonym, has not yet been established. A report published by Newsweek a few days ago caused a sensation. The magazine claimed to have found the creator of the bitcoin: a 64-year-old American-Japanese physicist living in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The latter denied any connection with the virtual currency, but the magazine insisted that he was the real founder of this currency system, especially since he undertook secret missions as a systems engineer for the US government, and had previously implicitly acknowledged his role in creating it.
Despite the mystery that still surrounds the identity of the coin’s creator, it has spread to a number of countries, especially among fans of video games on the Internet, as Badawi tells us: “Many have invested a few dollars to become very rich today.” Germany is the first country to recognize Bitcoin as a foreign currency, but a number of other countries do not have a clear position on it or on how to deal with it, such as France and India, for example, or even refuse to recognize it as a currency like the United Kingdom. Despite the controversy over the "identity" of this currency, some countries have recently witnessed the emergence of a number of financial teller machines, such as Japan, Ireland, and the United States ...
All of these situations are attributed to the fact that Bitcoin has been associated with many cybercriminal activities, so that the FBI considered that it will continue to attract cyber criminals who consider it a means of transferring and stealing money, which linked Bitcoin to the "black market" to buy illegal goods such as drugs and weapons, and with operations. Money laundering and ponzi scheme fraud, as well as theft. The latter caused the announcement of Mt. The Japanese Gox, one of the most famous virtual currency trading sites used on the Internet, "Bitcoin", has gone bankrupt, and the site stated that it lost about 750 thousand "Bitcoin" currencies from customer savings, along with 100 thousand currencies owned by it. It is reported that the real value of MTGox's losses amounted to about half a billion dollars, followed by the Canadian bank Flexcoin, which announced the suspension of its activities after all its 856 Bitcoin units (equivalent to 600,000 dollars) were stolen.
The future of virtual currency
Despite the misuse and lack of knowledge of Bitcoin by many individuals, this currency, if properly used, may develop and become a new medium of dealing. Badawi does not think that it will ever replace the traditional currency. Rather, he sees it as a "more effective and less expensive way to transfer money," but he stresses that the matter depends on "the stability of its exchange rate against other currencies." Stability remains dependent on the position of governments and the adoption of more companies and stores.
Badawi believes that this virtual currency may find its way in the United Arab Emirates, as he did not find any article or law prohibiting dealing with it. For him, "this currency will not make the business more successful and prosperous, but it may attract a new segment of customers who use Bitcoin." He confirms that more individuals, and even some investors and legislators in the UAE, are beginning to be interested in learning more about this virtual currency even if banks are still conservative, or even opposed to Bitcoin because of the threat it may pose. However, this fear is not valid for Badawi, as this currency was found to facilitate the lives of individuals, not to replace the traditional currency. "Imagine the sums that any tourist would lose due to the currency and commissions difference, and imagine the sums he would save if he used Bitcoin," he says.
The Pizza Guys was the first experience in the Arab region, but it is no longer the only one. Turtle Green Cafe in Amman - Jordan has started dealing in Bitcoin, and experiments may follow in the coming months.