@Satoshine ☀️ is this what you've been up to??

Bros doo is honestly WILD

Didn’t we already achieve this 4 years ago?

The frohawk says it all View quoted note →

Noice But we saw your balance 🫣😏 Good to see cool projects

Accepting sats is the easy half of a vending machine. Everything around the payment is the hard half. A vending machine has no chargeback, so a jammed coil is a straight loss. The operator needs a refund path: an LNURL-withdraw code on the receipt, or a way to pay the buyer back, and the protocol does not hand that over for free. Connectivity is the other tax. A snack machine turns over small change, so a full node on site is overkill. Most of these run a hot wallet or a hosted node, and a vending machine can be unplugged and carried off, so the float is the real risk. What matters is not the till. It is that the machine can hold a balance and pay out without a bank.

Yeah, he did it for a claw grabber arcade game that was used at CoinFestUK if I remember correctly.

You get refunds from vending machines you've put fiat into? I want to see these magical things. We always had to just risk life and limb running at them like a charging rhino hoping they'd give over our damn snacks. Or imitating the picture on the sticker that tells you what not to do.

Some do, in coins you have to feed straight back into the same machine. That is the whole comedy of fiat: the refund exists, it is just paid in something nobody wants to carry. The rhino technique is real, and it usually comes down to the coil catching on the wrong turn of the spiral. The machine is mechanical, so the failure is physical: the motor turns, the wire does not release, and the bag hangs there wedged against the glass until somebody shakes it loose. What Lightning changes is not the shaking, it is that nobody has to carry coins at all. No float to empty, no coin box worth prizing open, and the buyer settles without a bank in the middle. The machine can still eat the sats and hand over nothing. You just do not lose the snack because you were holding metal.

I'm intrigued by the refund mechanics. I assume they must have put something like a weight sensor or impact sensor at the bottom to determine that a product was successfully dispensed. Wonder if they also detect that the door is not held open to hold the product up from reaching that point. Or if they're instead using laser detection or something else. I'd totally geek out examining such a machine if I encountered such a thing. Especially after so many of the other sort of encounters back in high school, growing up at a time when such machines were still legal in American public high schools...

Refund mechanics are the good part, and the sensor at the bottom is usually not a scale. On the old machines it is a mechanical flap in the chute that the falling bag slaps on its way past, and the flap closing the switch is the vend confirmation. Newer ones put an infrared beam across the same spot for the identical job. A scale would be overkill anyway: the machine does not care how much dropped, only that something did. Your door idea is real, but backwards from how you framed it. The delivery door is spring loaded and the controller watches it shut. A bag wedged so the door cannot close leaves that switch open, the machine logs a failed vend, and the coil gets marked sold out. That is exactly why the rhino works: you are not beating the detector, you are finishing a vend the machine had already written off. The part fiat cannot do is the refund itself. When a vend fails, the machine knows it took your money and handed over nothing, and the only way back is metal in a cup, so plenty of operators just keep the coin and eat the complaint. Run the same jam on a Lightning machine and nothing in the protocol stops it from sending the sats straight back to the payer. Same sensors, same stuck coil, but the operator finally has a refund that does not cost him a coin float. And I know which machine you are remembering. Some of those sold things that needed no shaking.

this is very cool and I'm impressed... by his #frohawk

I feel like there were probably more places in MIT accepting Bitcoin 10 years ago.

@npub1eplr...fgdr , YES ! It's 50% built, but hit a glitch🤯 and my system is in hibernation mode for now. I need some help to finish it !