So I’ve used this service before, back in december I gave it a go and at first had problems ‘paying’ for the gift cards, I did’nt have a compatible wallet that allowed me to pay the bitpay payment process, it’s a dedicated payment protocol that they use that a handful of wallets support natively, you can literally copy and paste the link they provide (bitpay) and the wallet takes care of it.
head over to giftoff to spend some of your lovely alt coins on gift cards and upgrade your equipment to make you a better steemian today!
I downloaded the latest version of electrum (even thou they found a vulnerability in a version prior to the latest 3.0.5) which works perfectly for this task, because of that bug I would not suggest at this time of using electrum as a wallet that you use to store any level of volume in there, maybe just send over enough to cover your gift cards and do the transaction all in the same sitting.
I’ve bought ITUNES and AMAZON gift cards but when I went to grab an amazon one this morning I could not find it there, maybe they have taken that off for some reason but I found the amazon one the best, it’s probably wise to only load under £100 gift cards at a time, also I’ve found that it’s best to let it sit in there, be smart about loading regular gift cards and it’s probably best to leave them to the end of month instead of just loading up daily on them, dunno why I just feel you set of all kinds of algorithms ;)
update I did find amazon again after looking at my favourites list giftoff but I’m not sure why I can’t find it on the front page, even thou I found it says ‘This card currently is not available for purchase’ which is a little odd, I wonder why that is, hope they fix it.
so instead let’s buy a £20 iTunes voucher
my usual go to amazon top up for some reason is not available for purchase at the moment — they plug in alt coins and take away amazon, ain’t that always the way with upgrades to web systems, give you something you want but take away the very thing that made the service useful! :)
As you can see once you click on payment you get the options to pay with a credit card and earn platform points, pay with bitcoin which brings up a bitpay method, if you have your bitcoin on a mobile with bitpay you can straight scan the qr code there or just copy the link and paste that into electrum to send, it’s actually super straight forward to do.
If you select alt coins to pay with however you get a stack of coins that are listed and some are greyed out, right now however you can pay with the following alt coins — 0x, Aragon, augur, bancor, bat, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, blackchin, civic, clams, dash, digibyte, district0x, dogecoin, edgeless, Eos, ether, ether classic, factoids, firstblood, funfair, game credits, gnosis, golem, iexec, Komodo, lbry, litecoin, matchpool, numeraire, omisego, potcoin, reddcoin, ripio, salt, startcoin, status, storj, swarmcity, vertcoin, waves, wetrust, wings and finally zcash! :)
Wow, that’s quite a bunch of alt coins supported, I’m gonna use dash today because I bought at $800 recently and I’ve managed to make a little bit of profit over the amount I bought and I’ve got an SBD payout in a little while anyway so I can cover this for the test.
once you select dash you have to put in your refund address, I presume if something goes wrong but it’s standard practice when using shapeshift to do these kind of transactions, this is what it uses and you can see below that now we have ten minutes to complete this transaction.
At every step they make it super clear to what you have to do, I was really surprised how easy this was to do, it’s amazing that we can use our alt coins to pay for things with a minimal charge for the send and to use the network, it really made no sense to pay for things with bitcoin in it’s current state — that may change with atomic swaps but we will have to see.
gift off have done an incredible job here making this work. I know they have put a message that it took a lot of work, long nights to pull it off but just the amount of alt coins they are supporting and the easy to use system make them a pretty attractive web site service for prospective investors to maybe look about acquiring so get at it while you can — fantastic service.
When was the last time your network fee was $0.02 to do a transaction on bitcoin, man it feels good to be able to flex these alt coin muscles and not get screwed for the transaction, it certainly feels like the act of using crypto currency increases when you have services like this working so easily.
Next you get a lovely message after you have done the transfer and literally about five minutes after that I got the email that the order had been received at this point I can expect to see my code to ‘top-up’ my apple iTunes account in my dashboard over on giftoff — it’s a dream to use!
and just like that we are done, now that it has alt-coins for accepting payments I can see myself using gift cards a lot more, this opens up massively the scope for the homeless projects to gift forward account codes and cards for people in transition or on the streets.
to be able to get something to eat today, imagine getting someone a prime account, delivering food parcels to amazon lockers, money for a coffee in a local coffee shop (at least in the uk here to start) — this is the real revolution.
please note that this a UK service only i believe, that is that the gift cards are for services in the uk, i do hope they bring back amazon gift cards at some point, that would be the true game changer!
bought myself a subscription to the second markdown editor i use for all my 'alt-accounts' here on steemit because it has folder support, i really wanted to pay for the yearly account at £35 but don't have that much but at least that £20 will pay for the next four months until i can afford to pay for the year -- always be upgrading the tools you need to get the job done!
update
the amazon card loading is returned, i asked them on twitter about it, sent them the link to this post which they loved, i'll put it in the comments below. they seem like a really receptive web company with a great developer behind it, the shapeshift intergration is divine! :) -- seems they have a 'float' for funds and they i presume the crypto payments go back into that and get converted etc, you know like putting up capital and then replacing it -- i love this service.
