Londoners buy their street burgers using Bitcoins

Street food burger Pic: Ron Dollete

Street food burger Pic: Ron Dollete

“That’ll be 0.01426 Bitcoins for your burger please.”

Shoreditch street-food vender Tom Reaney is providing his technology loving customers with a new and fun way to buy their burgers.

Reaney, 28, from Peckham, is the first street food vendor to start accepting Bitcoin as an alternative to the Pound at his Burger Bear eatery.

Customers can leave their wallets at home and pay for their food using smartphones.

Reaney made his first Bitcoin burger sale last week to Ryan Holder, a developer who has been using Bitcoin for a number of years. Holder typifies Reaney’s target audience.

Reaney said: “A lot of my customers in east London are digital, techy, geeks, coders and they love it. It keeps me ahead of the curve when dealing with those guys. They are great people to be around as they are very pro start-up businesses.”

Reaney became interested in the crypto currency earlier this year when he bought a Bitcoin for around £61 and saw its value soar: “Since I got my first Bitcoin I’ve made nearly three grand for doing absolutely nothing.”

The currency is always fluctuating, but at the time of writing, a burger from Burger Bear was valued at 0.01426 BTC (£7.50).

Reaney is wary that the unpredictability of the currency is an on-going risk to his finances and could cost him. He said: “It’s volatile – if the tide fluctuates then I’d lose quite a lot of the business.”

For this reason, he does not consider Bitcoin as “a serious payment system,” but rather “a little bit of fun and an investment.”

Reaney’s Burger Bear stand can be found every Thursday and Friday at Hackney’s Leonard Street roundabout.

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