Fellow Hiver @curamax made an amazing discovery last week: yes, we can all spend our crypto -- Bitcoin of course but also Hive -- at Paypal, Walmart, and Amazon through Uquid. All the relevant links and a walkthrough of the process are in @curamax's post right here, but the basics are that Uquid lets you buy gift cards to a goodly number of retailers including Paypal, Walmart, or Amazon, with the ability through customization to fill each card with the USD equivalent of $1K-$1.5K and to get as many as 10 cards at a time. That's a nice situation right there, without KYC/AML!
Consider the ramifications of this for a moment if the retail crowd realizes that crypto can now be spent on everyday things by anyone with just an email address. Imagine what that does for adoption possibilities when people can take profit from any pump in Bitcoin or Hive and a bunch of other coins and turn it immediately into gift cards to buy things in the real world. Also understand: ANY PUMP, even in a down market, can be thus converted … and thus we start the conversation about things to do during the coming bear market to keep the benefits from crypto coming!
Maybe ... indeed Uquid provides us another way to immediately cash out our Bitcoin and Hive for other things we may want or need that global marketplaces and service providers can provide. Those of us who started early are in a particularly strong position to make use of the possibility —but I wonder here: how many more consumer goods do we need, such that we should spend our Bitcoin or Hive on them at Walmart and Amazon? Obviously we all have necessities, but I think the same discipline that has allowed us to build ourselves in Bitcoin and Hive will serve us well now that the opportunity to go around fiat and buy things is in play. Consumerism is not the friend of the crypto wise.
I do see the value of Paypal outright though, because of the variety of things you can pay for through Paypal: services as well as goods, and also gifts to friends and family. This is a way to bless PEOPLE through crypto who don't have it yet in terms that they can understand and use, and maybe, in explaining how, to bring them into the knowledge of the power of both Bitcoin and Hive. I also see this as a global solution for people who are on the move for various reasons -- use Bitcoin and Hive directly for everything possible, and Paypal and even Amazon can cover quite a lot of the rest in the world.
And then there are the increasing number of crypto debit cards to use anywhere and everywhere ... but that's a different post that @alex.rourke has already written, right here!