‘Mystery Man’ Gets Berlin Shop to Drop BitPay, Accept Bitcoin Directly

An ice cream shop in Berlin’s trendy Friedrichshain district has revealed that a chat with an unknown “super nice” guy spurred them to spearhead Bitcoin adoption with the local crowd.

That unknown guy turned out to have been the legendary Bitcoin (BTC) evangelist and educator Andreas Antonopoulos, as a Nov. 21 Twitter thread from the retailer, “Chipi Chipi Bombón,” revealed.

Andreas Antonopoulos spreads knowledge

Everything began in a local burger bar.

“We started accepting Bitcoin in June of this year. At Room 77  I met a guy who was super nice & explained to me all the basics about Bitcoin & got me interested in getting BTC myself instead of using BitPay & receiving euros. The next day I found out he was Andreas Antonopoulos.”

The thread continues to outline that paving the way toward crypto entrepreneurship began with getting a Trezor hardware wallet for cold storage and starting to directly accept Bitcoin via the open-source payment processor BTCPay Server. 

Weeks later, the shop began accepting payments via the second-layer scalability solution Lightning Network, later taking its ice cream and hot chocolate to Berlin’s Lightning Conference. The thread continues:

“I’m convinced that little shops like ours are a very important factor to bitcoin growth.

When non bitcoiners see more businesses accepting bitcoin, they will start to stop fearing it and would get more curious about it and would like to be a part of it.”

The since-exposed Antonopoulos responded positively on Twitter, writing:

“You took the effort to fully understand cryptocurrency and the implications of how you could better run your business with it. More small businesses need to do exactly this. Amazing.”

Judging by other responses to the thread, it cannot hurt the industry’s future that these local Bitcoin pioneers also happen to make “superb” gelato.

Bitcoin Gelato Day

Perhaps the most famous culinary crypto anecdote will remain forever associated with May 22, 2010 — the day the first-ever purchase with Bitcoin was made for an order of two pizzas at a cost of 10,000 BTC. In today’s prices, that would be an almost $80 million takeaway. 

Today the milestone is celebrated each year as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

This October, the French national branch of Domino's Pizza launched an ordering competition, offering the winner a prize of $110,000 in Bitcoin or cash.