McDonald's, Pizza and Coffee Paid in Bitcoin: Plan B for Crypto Payments

Crypto payments take off in a big way in Lugano, Switzerland with 60 merchants and counting.

Over the weekend, thousands of Bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts descended on the sleepy little town of Lugano in Switzerland. Specifically, they piled into a McDonald's restaurant.

Perched on Lake Lugano, Mcdonald's Lugano has received countless visits from Bitcoiners eager to exchange Satoshis (the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin) for Big Macs, McFlurries and coffee.

But why were European crypto enthusiasts excited to pay in Bitcoin (BTC) at one of the world's best-known brands? Well, first to demonstrate the Lightning Network, a Layer-2 technology built on Bitcoin. But also to fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto's promise that Bitcoin is, in fact, an electronic payment system.

McDonald's order was paid for with #Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.

I went for a Saifedean style order. pic.twitter.com/srIsj9SAfB

The entire McDonald's team had been trained and onboarded to the Bitcoin network just days before Europe's major Bitcoin and blockchain conference, the Plan B Forum, said Paolo Ardoino, Chief Technology Officer of Tether, at Cointelegraph.

The Italian expat gave Cointelegraph insight into Bitcoin and crypto adoption in Lugano, joking that the hands-on process of educating traders on how to accept crypto can take time: "At McDonald's, we spend about a week because they have a ton of people working there."

Ardoino's company, Tether, has orchestrated a massive plan to get the economic capital of Italian Switzerland to embrace Bitcoin and crypto. What started as a plan to get citizens to pay their taxes...