How to live on crypto, part three: shop online!
Hi, and welcome back to how to live on crypto! By now you should know how to get and use a wallet, as well as how to buy your first crypto. Now I’ll show you how to spend it.
You’re probably going to do most of your spending online. This is because there are more online businesses that accept crypto, and in-person, point-of-sale merchant solutions just aren’t that well-developed yet. After all, you could already pay in-person with cash, now you can shop online with digital cash.
Gift Cards
First, you’re going to be using Bitrefill a lot. Bitrefill is a service that lets you buy digital gift cards for a wide variety of businesses worldwide, including some of the largest retailers. This means that you can spend crypto at a lot of places that don’t yet accept it directly. You just buy gift codes, which are like store credit, and use that.
The most important store on Bitrefill is obviously Amazon. You can get just about anything in the world from Amazon, and just this alone makes it so much easier to live on crypto. Here’s how to do it: Go to Amazon, add what you want to buy to your cart, and go to check out. Then, open Bitrefill in a new tab. Select Amazon, select the amount of credit to buy (or enter a custom amount), add to cart, check out, enter your email address, and select Dash as the payment option. Then copy and paste both the amount of Dash, and the Dash address, into your wallet. Hit send. Almost instantly, Bitrefill should display your Amazon gift code. If not, check your email. Paste that code into your Amazon checkout window, and then confirm your order.
It’s a similar process when using Bitrefill to buy anything else online. Just check ahead of time how each business handles gift codes. You can use Bitrefill without having an account, but if you create one you can get reward points for shopping, which translate to discounts.
The Dash website also has its own gift cards section, some with significant discounts, at giftcards.dash.org. This is mainly for US-based customers. CryptoRefills has some good discounts as well.
Purse.io is another great site for buying things off of Amazon for crypto, sometimes with significant discounts, but it’s a more complicated process, and you need to get some Bitcoin Cash to use it. If you’ve got some extra time, use SwapSpace to switch cryptos like I showed you in the last video, and watch the linked video on how to use Purse.
Shopping Directly With Crypto
Now let’s look at buying things directly with crypto. It works the same as paying any other invoice we’ve seen before: go to check out, select the option to pay with crypto, copy and paste the address and the amount into your wallet, and hit send. Note that sometimes this payment option is labeled “Bitcoin” or “altcoins.”
There are quite a few places to spend crypto directly. Crypto Emporium is a site that only accepts cryptocurrency, and even prices things in cryptocurrency! It’s where I got my phone that I’m using to record this video, and they sell all kinds of electronics, vehicles, even property. We Shop With Crypto and ShopInBit are other great general purpose online crypto stores, and SatoshiGoods is a great place to get more specifically crypto-related items. And of course, Scofflaws.Shop, the store you see me buying t-shirts from earlier.
To find more online businesses that take crypto, try CryptWerk. Or, just search for “spend cryptocurrency” or “spend Bitcoin” and see what you can find.
Remember when shopping online with crypto to double check the address and the amount, because you can’t reverse a payment once you send it. If a mistake is made, you’ll need to get in touch with the company to issue a refund.
That’s it for this time! Next time I’ll show you how to travel using only crypto. See you then!
Links
Bitrefill
Dash Gift Cards
CryptoRefills
Crypto Emporium
We Shop With Crypto
Satoshi Goods
ShopInBit
CryptWerk
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