Whenever I travel I like to visit bitcoin-accepting places to see how things work and keep an eye on physical world adoption. Bic Camera is one of the biggest retailers to accept bitcoin, so obviously I had to check it out.So I walked to the cashier and told the guy I wanted to pay with bitcoin. He said ok and then spoke Japanese on the phone for a few minutes. My Japanese sucks, so I can only guess what that was about, but it seemed like he had no clue how to do it and was getting trained over the phone on how to accept btc payments. He went through a bunch of paper manuals and after a few minutes of waiting he finally started tapping something on a phone near the register. About 5 minutes in and I finally see a familar QR code with a btc address below it. I whip out my phone, samourai-style and happily pay the amount. Something happened on the screen and the guy picked up the phone again and started talking.A few more minutes pass, he looks at my phone's screen, then asks me to talk to someone on the phone in English. A woman asks if I have a transaction on my phone. At that point I was worried they're gonna wait for a block confirmation or something, but I got lucky anyways and had like 2 confirmations by that time, so all seemed ok. The woman asks if I have the transaction on my phone. I confirmed and handed the phone back to the guy.He asks me to wait a little longer, and starts calling more people. Turns out BitFlyer (their payment processor) screwed up and the transaction doesn't show up as confirmed. About 20 minutes in the guy invites to me to sit while they figure it out. Another guy comes to help and then they proceed to spend another 20 minutes talking on the phone, handing the phone over to me every now and then to answer some lame questions. The woman on the phone had absolutely no clue what she was doing. She asked me twice if I had a BitFlyer account.I'm at 5 confirmations already and it turns out BitFlyer cannot verify if my transaction went through, because their support wasn't available anymore on that day and they ask me if I want to pay again with credit card, which I obviously refused. I asked if I can come back the next day once they sort this out, but they somehow avoided a direct answer to that question and asked for my email address. They told me someone from BitFlyer would contact me and do a refund.I wrote down my email address on a piece of paper, then they proceeded to spell it out to check if they got it right. I wrote my email all caps to make it more readable and avoid any mistakes. Then they called some woman again and started spelling out the address to her over the phone, twice, which took several more minutes. The woman on the phone asked me twice if my email address should be lower or uppercase, which I said makes no difference at all, but they could use lowercase if they wanted to. After a few more minutes they call again to ask the exact same question...And then, after sitting there for about an hour, I get an email from BitFlyer support (!!!) via Zendesk asking if this is the correct email address....There were many more disturbing little things going on there, but I don't want to get into too much details. The BitFlyer PoS was web-based, barely working and complete trash. They're support couldn't check a transaction, but was somehow able to instantly contact me via email. Now they're saying they need several days to verify and process my refund. BitFlyer has been around for a while, got $36m in funding and they still can't the most basic on-chain transactions working.So I've spent over an hour at Bic Camera dealing with this bullcrap, did not succeed in actually purchasing anything and my btc is locked at some shitty payment processor.**TL;DR** Went to Bic Camera to buy stuff with bitcoin via BitFlyer; wasted over an hour of my life, failed to buy anything, my bitcoin is being held by BitFlyer; conclusion - avoid BitFlyer at all costs. via /r/Bitcoin http://bit.ly/2OfbZMf
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