Yesterday I bought my first Pizza with Bitcoin. Sadly, this was a pretty unpleasant experience. But one I want to share with you guys. Maybe it can help someone with the same problems, maybe we can improve something. So let me start my story.

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I checked a few delivery services in my area and found one that offers Bitcoins as a payment method. Since I never really used Bitcoin for payments I thought, let's try this and maybe I can even convince my wife that Bitcoin is pretty useable now.

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So I chose my Pizza and some food for the wife and went on to pay for it. I had some Bitcoin (about 20 USD) on my phone wallet (Eclair) and thought that should be an easy deal. Yeah, how wrong I was…

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I got to the payment process and they forwarded me to Bitpay. First thing I see is "choose your currency"

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o) Bitcoin (network cost 0.50 USD)

o) Bitcoin Cash (network cost 0.00 USD)

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It kinda felt like they wanted to push me towards BCH (maybe that's just me). But it's still nice to have some options to pay. Especially because the food delivery service only offered Bitcoin payments on his homepage.

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At the same time, a countdown started to finish my payment before the order gets rejected (about 15 min).

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So I chose Bitcoin and got a QR code I can scan to pay it. I scanned the code with my wallet and got the error "This is not a valid Bitcoin address". Well, shit. My countdown was already down to 12 minutes so I had to hurry and figure out what's wrong.

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Next step I tried to copy the address and paste it into my wallet, but still not working. I was just getting some strange looking link (bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). Countdown was down to 10 minutes.

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After that, I looked it up on google and saw that Bitpay seemingly tries to force feed their own wallet on you to make payments. Since I didn't want to download their wallet or even send my money there (especially because I only had a few minutes left), I looked further and found some help on Bitcointalk. Some users there found a way around this with using a decoder that changes the Bitpay link into an actual Bitcoin address. (https://decoder.bip70.org/).

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The site itself didn't look that trustworthy but since I only got about 3 minutes left I went on to gave it a try. I sent my Bitcoin to the decoded address. And look there, it worked. Bitpay told me they see my payment but we need to wait for confirmation. But wait, there is more.

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Since I didn't look into the payment details I did send a little bit too much money (included too much transaction fees). So I ended up paying something like 3x the from Bitpay recommended fee. But I didn't mind that so much. What troubled me was the message Bitpay showed me, it was something like that:

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"This payment was made with a low bitcoin miner fee, which may prevent it from being accepted by the bitcoin network. This is an issue with the configuration of your bitcoin wallet. If the transaction doesn't confirm, the funds will be again in your wallet in about 48-72 hours."

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And I was like, what? How could the fee be to low if I used three times more than recommended? Should I now wait 72 hours before ordering a new Pizza? Becoming more and more hungry I still decided to wait out and see if my transactions will get confirmed. And my patience got rewarded, about half an hour later they confirmed my payment and the order got routed to the Pizza Restaurant. An hour later I finally got my Pizza and it was delicious. Well, maybe because I was already dying because I was so hungry but still. At least I had a happy end.

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Needlessness to say, I couldn't convince my wife to use Bitcoin for further Pizza deliveries. Moreover, I can't even recommend it to anyone new to Bitcoin because that was quite a shitty experience. Mostly because of Bitpay I would argue.

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Don't get me wrong, I really love Bitcoin and the opportunities it provides. But it seems, we still have a long way to go for mass adoption (or even an easy way to order Pizza).

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Since I would love to improve that process I thought about sending that delivery service some feedback. To even give them an opportunity to improve, I think they would have to move away from Bitpay to another payment service. Anything you guys can recommend for Europe?