That's right, the things you can buy with Bitcoin are expanding!
Did you know that you can purchase gasoline with Bitcoin, at least in some parts of the country?
Texas based oil and gas data company, Oilfield Intel LLC announced a few years ago that they would accept Bitcoin at their retail gas station. This marked the first in the industry to do so.
Then a few months later, the Cosmic Market in Greeley Colorado announced that they would be accepting Bitcoin at their retail gas station and also manually in their convenience store as well.
Those were exciting developments but haven't spurred much adoption up to this point.
The real exciting news comes from an inventor...
Andy Schroder invented a new way of purchasing fuel via Bitcoin.
He designed and built a fuel machine that allows customers to scan a QR code and send Bitcoin instead of using more traditional means of payment to fill up their vehicle.
If this were to catch on, it could change the entire way we as consumers obtain commodities that we use every day.
Schroder hopes to adapt his design to incorporate the new Lightning off-chain payments technology, which would allow for real time micro-payments which could take his payment idea mainstream.
So far, he is having some issues incorporating the technology.
As it operates now, the payment processing system refunds any unused portions of the Bitcoin prepaid amount. A fixed amount is prepaid upfront and the unused portion is distributed back to the customer.
That second part is causing a bit of hangup with using the Lightning technology.
Schroder is currently using Bitcoin Improvement Protocol (BIP 70) which creates a receipt for the customer and also automatically provides a refund address to the seller.
The Lightning invoice protocol doesn't appear to accommodate such refunds.
A possible fix could involve fitting cars with an on-board digital wallet, although that would be more of a longer term fix for the problem and not one that could likely be implemented in the very near term.
Schroder is going back to the drawing board, figuring out how he can make this all work, but if history is any indicator, he will figure out a solution in no time.
Stay informed my friends.