BitBar by Grouper - Buy drinks with bitcoin at bars in 23 US cities | Hacker News Reader

BitBar by Grouper - Buy drinks with bitcoin at bars in 23 US cities

bitbar.io

38 pointsnottombrown15 comments

How are you dealing with the recent slowness of BTC transaction confirmations? Transactions can easily take over an hour now, especially if naive users don't understand how to set fees.

Currently we use coinbase, which automatically sets a reasonable fee on transactions. So far all my transactions have been faster than a few minutes.

You should switch to dogecoin since it has a faster confirmations.

I assume you're joking, but faster confirmation times doesn't necessarily mean they're equally secure. Blocks take time to propagate across the network, so if the confirmation time is too short miners will be working on old blocks for a larger portion of that time, essentially wasting some of their hashing power, making it easier for an attacker to beat them.

I was joking, yes.

Grouper founder here. Would love to get feedback on BitBar.

Why would someone use this over just paying with cash other than to make a social statement? I support bitcoin but this doesn't seem especially convenient.

sounds like you could skip a line at crowded bar. (i.e. sitting at your table pay and wait for your alias called) But i might be wrong.

Yeah, a few of my friends in Milwaukee put together a product called Tappr[1] which did this, except with credit cards (and it was super convenient). Unfortunately I moved out West, so I haven't been able to use it in a while.

[1] http://www.gettappr.com

Nice responsive site. The two biggest pain points for me without evening purchasing a drink; 1) finding a nearby bar is quite painful especially on a mobile device. Possibly integrate html5 geolocation to pinpoint and zoom in on your current location. 2) You have to click a map icon to determine the bar name, then intuitively I press ESC to exit, which doesn't work. Took me a few tries to realize you just click to get out. It was annoying figuring that out after a few page refreshes and the painful zooming in

The map at the bottom probably shouldn't span the entire page; it tracks mouse / trackpad movement once it's scrolled over - makes it difficult to scroll to the bottom of the page.

Good call, I'll add some padding

You could also just add a "scrollwheel:false" parameter to the google maps options.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2330272

BTW, just watched your mixergy interview today - great stuff! Learned a lot.

Please show the bar names over the pins, or, at the very least, on hover. It's quite a pain to figure out what the options are in Boston right now.

I replied with feedback on twitter.

Interacting with the map should hide the top and make the only thing scrollable in the viewport the map (with the "Your Alias" bar fixed at the top). Scrolling down causes you to zoom out when your mouse is over the map, which is a really bad experience.

When you scroll down, maybe the "Your Alias" bar has the BitBar logo on the left, and a metro-picker dropdown on the right. This would make the usability a lot cleaner, because it's hard to zoom into a city if you accidentally click on a bar, which slides up the Drink Picker.

There should also be a "Cancel" on the Drink Picker, that doesn't require you to click on the map, because clicking on the map puts the body scrollTop to 0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com