The Stall-Keeper's Guide

Sort your wallet before the crowd arrives

Choose a wallet app you actually understand, and use it a few times before market day. Send yourself a small payment at home and receive it back, so the first time you see the flow is not with a queue behind you and a bag of onions in your other hand. This guide does not recommend any wallet; the right one is the one you can explain to a curious shopper.

Write your recovery words on paper, keep that paper somewhere that is not your stall, and never type those words into a website, this one included. Nobody honest will ever need them from you.

Price in your own money first

Start where you already think: what does this cost you to grow, bake or buy, and what do you need to earn from it? Settle the price in the money you use every day. Only then convert it to sats. That keeps your prices rooted in your costs and your craft rather than in the daily mood of an exchange rate.

The Tag Maker follows exactly this order. It stores the price in your money and works out the sats on the fly, which is why changing your rate refreshes every tag on the sheet at once.

Pick a rate and write it on the board

Sat Market asks you for a rate because it cannot know one, and it would be wrong to pretend. Pick a single source you trust, read the number once in the morning and use it for every tag you print. Two apples on the same table should never disagree about what they cost.

Say when you set it. The Tag Maker has a small-print line for exactly that: "rate set this morning" is honest, short and stops arguments before they start.

Round like a friend

A tag reading 4,017 sats is perfectly accurate and a little bit annoying. A tag reading 4,000 is something a person can say out loud, remember and add up in their head. Pick a rounding step that suits your prices: small steps for cheap things, bigger ones for dearer things, and keep the same rule across the whole table.

The thing to watch is how far rounding moves the price. Rounding a 40-sat price to the nearest 100 is a big change; rounding a 40,000-sat price to the nearest 100 is a rounding error. Type a price into the ladder below to see it for yourself.

When the market wobbles

The rate you typed this morning may have moved by lunchtime, up or down, and nobody at this stall can tell you which. What you can do is decide your policy ahead of time and say it plainly.

• Honour the morning tags until close. Simple, kind and easy to explain. You accept that some days it works for you and some days it works for them.
• Re-check at a set time. Maybe noon. Type the new rate, reprint the sheet and swap the tags. Tell shoppers what time the tags change.
• Quote the big things. For a dearer item, work the price out on the spot with the Basket and agree it before anyone reaches for a phone.

Waiting, change and small stuff

Bitcoin's network aims to add a block roughly every ten minutes, and how quickly a given payment feels settled depends on the wallets and methods you and your shopper use. Decide in advance what counts as "paid" for a bunch of radishes and what counts for something dearer, and check your own wallet's documentation for how it describes those states. This guide cannot tell you what is safe for your setup.

The nice thing about sats is that nobody needs coins in a pocket to make change. A price can be exactly what it is, and a kind rounding makes it easy to say. If a shopper wants to pay a little over, the Basket's round-up tip makes that a one-click sum.

Talk to shoppers like neighbours

Most people who ask about sats are curious, not suspicious. Have a one-line answer ready: a sat is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. Show the price in your own money on the tag, too, using the Tag Maker's checkbox, so nobody has to do arithmetic to know whether they are happy.

Never rush a first-timer. A stall that lets people fumble kindly is a stall that gets recommended.

Guard your receiving code

If you display a printed receiving code, print it yourself, protect it with a clear sleeve and glance at it through the day to make sure nobody has stuck a different code over the top. Swapped payment stickers are an old trick that has nothing to do with bitcoin in particular. Even better, show a fresh request from your wallet for each sale and check the amount on your own screen before you hand over the goods.

Keep your phone on you, set a screen lock and keep the recovery words far from the till.

Keep tidy books

A simple notebook does the job. For every sale jot the date, the item, the price in your money, the sats you received and the rate you used. Future you will be grateful.

How sales like these are treated for tax differs from place to place and changes over time. This guide cannot tell you the rules where you live, so ask a local adviser or your tax office. And whatever you do with the sats you hold after the market closes is your own decision; nothing on this site is financial advice.

Pack down kindly

Add up the day in your notebook, then take the tags down and keep the good ones for next time. Clear the pitch, thank the neighbours either side and leave the ground tidier than you found it. Tomorrow, type a fresh rate before you print anything, because yesterday's rate was only ever yesterday's.