So yesterday I was listening to the new CCT podcast and @starkerz and @brianoflondon occasionally mention #Bitrefill. Naturally I was curious and checked it out...
W-O-W
You are telling me that we have had this running the whole time and I didn't know about it?!
Bitrefill's motto is "Live On Crypto"
and that's exactly what it is. With Bitrefill you can buy goods and services with crypto! Why is this amazing?!
First, it actually has useful/common shops!
I know from other sites that tried this that there were only very small vendors available. I never expected to find the top online shops here like amazon, hotels.com, Steam, lastminute.com etc.!Second, no KYC!
Are you serious!? You can literally go to any shop and just send some crypto (most common are accepted) to an address Bitrefill provides you and buy stuff! Crazy... and here I was sitting thinking that a crypto/fiat bridge is still years down the road. One caveat is of course that for some shops you will obviously need KYC (e.g. if you want that amazon delivers somehting to your home address).
How does this work?
The trick is that you buy vouchers and that you can use these for your favorite online shops (again, it is not just restricted to retail!). In this way they don't need you to provide a KYC and they use some third party service to convert crypto to the voucher you want.
This is great. I can now buy my groceries or clothes with Hive. This saves me like $500-700 a month in fiat money and nobody asks any questions. It's just magic! In fact the first time I tried it I didn't believe that it would work. So I tried it out: send Hive to e.g. blocktrades which then converts Hive to e.g. Bitcoin and sends it the address Bitrefill gives you. Wait 10 minutes and BAM! You get the voucher...
I ran to the local grocery shop here and bought the very first blueberries with HIVE!
Again, this is a game changer
It's something we all wanted and it's here now.
Only one big caveat:
I have no idea how long this will last. Living in a highly regulated country I think it is just a matter of time before they make KYC obligatory... So enjoy while it lasts :)
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