Coupa Café sells coffee to the Silicon Valley pros in exchange for Bitcoins

Any worker in Silicon Valley knows the Coupa Café, located in downtown Palo Alto. And now they have more reasons to visit the establishment, since the coffee shop is accepting Bitcoin.

The software used by the café to manage the Bitcoin payments was especially created by a Facebook software engineer. “It’s like when the Internet first started in the ’90s”, says Mike Landau, who collaborated on the virtual currency system with his close friend, Jean Paul Coupal, the co-owner of Coupa Café.

The comparison makes sense: at the beginning of the internet era, people only thought about computer-to-computer communication, but an entire web came up, allowing them to exchange information. That’s really similar to cryptocurrency. According to Landau,  “Bitcoin does two things. One is, it’s a currency. But it’s also a medium of transaction. You can imagine it being kind of like PayPal, but completely open source and decentralized. There’s no one company that’s in charge”.

At Coupa Café, located on Ramona Street, the customers are getting used to the idea of paying with digital coin. Thanks to the system created by Mike Landau, Coupa has already done more than $200 worth in Bitcoin transactions since launching the new system about a month ago.

For now, Coupa Café is the only physical business in Palo Alto that accepts Bitcoins, but we hope that changes really fast.