After a long week at work and attending boring social events, what better way to reward yourself than with a hearty takeout dish and no washing-up to boot. German-based Lieferando is home to more than 13,000 restaurants and is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment method – a brilliant use for that crypto you got for Christmas. Germany is the home of technological innovation, and this marks the latest step in the country’s march towards crypto adoption.
Teaming up with BitPay
Lieferando’s parent company – takeaway.com – has teamed up with BitPay to provide the Bitcoin payment gateway. Takeaway.com deployed the BitPay gateway on the polish version of its site back in 2017, and with the great feedback and growing demand for Bitcoin payments in Germany, decided to enable it at Lieferando. BitPay is one of the most popular payment gateways for businesses at the moment, due to its ease of use and the fact that it automatically converts the crypto into fiat – meaning vendors have no exposure to crypto market movements.
Free Food is a Possibility
Exactly how long it would take BitPay to notice and notify Lieferando is unknown, but if the time is long enough you could manage to grab some free food. BitPay is known to use 0-Conf to speed up the transaction process, meaning that BitPay will send the vendor the cash before it has received 6 or more confirmations from the Bitcoin network – a process that could take upwards of several minutes. For these few moments, BitPay bears exposure to losing out with a double spend attack. If you order €15 worth of food, you could have already sent a transaction to the network with that €15, leaving €0 in your wallet to pay for the food. Because BitPay will move on with the order process in the meantime, you could end up with free food.
Unfortunately, eventually it would get back to Lieferando and you would still end up paying the bill, but at a later date. Nonetheless, there is still a real chance this type of attack could take place.
BitPay’s Vulnerability
Back in November, merchants with BitPay wallets had alarm bells ringing when they opened up their app. A bug was discovered in a third-party NodeJS package that could potentially allow hackers to steal your private keys. The only way to resolve the issue and remain safe was to send all crypto to a new wallet. This process is relatively simple, but for many store merchants it’s a hassle they didn’t need. Bugs like this need to end before we see more stores relying on BitPay as a primary payment processor.
What better way to get over hump day than with some Bitcoin takeout – if you’re in Germany at least. Hopefully, it’s not long before other online takeout websites are offering the same option, we are sure it would be a much-welcomed addition.
