My Experience Using the Bitpay Debit Card for a Few Months
A few months ago I finally decided to check into getting a bitcoin debit card, mostly because the price had gone up, I was looking to pay off a little extra in college loans and pulling out in tradional ways was becoming worrysome and semi expensive. I saw the Bitpay debit card as a way to bypass many of these issues and ultimately im glad I picked it up. If you want a too long didn’t read version of this article, if you want to spend some of your gains and no worry about having to deal with banking institutions, the debit card is completely worth it. However, here is the long answer.
With banks still not being exactly crypto friendly and me not wanting to pull out multiple amounts from coinbase in a month and trigger some sort of account closure, the Bitpay debit card was a great solution. At the time I was pulling out money from coinbase into paypal and using their debit card/withdrawal system so the banks didn’t think anything was suspicious, which was costing me a bit of money since they take like a 5% cut. With the Bitpay card things were much easier, its around a $15 startup cost and the amounts on a transaction are very minimal. You send your bitcoin to the card one time, it automatically converts it on the spot and you can spend it at any store in person or the vast majority online.
I have never had a problem with the debit card in stores, but there are a small amount of times where online credit card recognition systems don’t recognize it as a card. This is usually unfortunate, but if you are looking for a certain item you can find it elsewhere at a site that will recognize it, or worst case scenario you can call up the company and give them the card. The daily limits on the card are in the thousands so I don’t think most people will hit it just doing daily stuff. I am still putting hundreds towards my college loans as much as I can and I have never had a problem with limits.
The best part about the card is just convenience overall and it does a good job branching the old world financial system with the new. While crypto is awesome and revolutionary, it will still take some time for most merchants to accept it, especially with certain companies that oversee bills like utilities, rent, ect. For a minimal amount of fees, the Bitpay debit card fixes most of these problems. I know many people got into crypto because they don’t want to work with the old legacy finance system with credit card companies and banks, but if you want to live on crypto it can be very hard to do so without at least one or two connections.
Overall if you spend a decent amount of crypto on bills or other payments a month and worry about getting a bank account flagged or shut down because of the payments and simply just don’t want to risk it, then the Bitpay debit card is a very good investment. It makes one less time I have to make my payments through a bank and lets me spend my crypto earnings as I please without any fear of them taking my money. While I know not everyone has had a great experience with Bitpay, I personally have found that for what I do with the card, it works very well. Even if you just take out cash via an ATM the charges end up being relatively small. You can check out the fee structure on their website, but I think they are very reasonable and offering the card not as a way to make lots of money, but to better connect crypto with the existing world.
-adas