You guessed it. The squeaky wheel got the grease.

For those unaware, I shared this story last week in which I paid using lightning to a Square terminal at the very moment that a cashier voided the sale. We found ourselves in a sticky situation as the payment had gone through on my end but didn’t show up on their end. The sats sat sadly in a Block node (presumably) while neither the seller nor buyer got what we had bargained for.

I did what any self-respecting man would, and came here to whine about it. Fortunately, true men of action such as @grayruby and @Scoresby took to the broader interwub and brought my cause before the grand magistrates at Block. Not only did they get me my money back, but did so in a way that whether I was accounting in sats or cents, there was no doubt that I came out on top!

And so I’ll drop the silly tone to finish with some gratitude as well as some perspective, given a couple of stackers apparently took this story as an indictment of lightning.

1. Gratitude: How cool is Block? When @typerbole and I got to discussing this on nostr, I mentioned that there was no need to pay me back. Why is that so? I’ve already made a decent chunk of change from bitcoin-related promos between CashApp and Square…and actually in sats at that! Also, they’re just making bitcoin usage more accessible in the west in general. They’re really investing in making the world more financially inclusive to an extreme degree. His next line was just to zap back the difference anyway followed by a nice note. Savagely generous customer service, committed in cold blood…all over a single beer… I’m really grateful to Block for all they do, but it’s always nice to see how an organization deals with the sticky stuff too.
2. Lightning: I’ve said it in the comments of the other post, but the lightning network did exactly what it was supposed to in this scenario. I only told this tale to bring a potential glitch in Square software to their attention. Apparently, as one can infer from point one, this was a good idea as it’s probably already addressed by now. The more I think about it, I can think of a couple of other times that I’ve had problems with lightning payments. But every single time it was user error, not a problem with the protocol failing. Here’s a funny example..

So here’s a toast to Block (and their subsidiaries) and here’s a toast to Lightning!

https://stacker.news/items/1497527