Do you use a Bitcoin Debit Card?
Everyone bitten by the Bitcoin Bug search high and low for a way to spend their coins or for new uses.
I had an idea to start saving bitcoin each month from my paycheck in different wallets for different purposes.
My motivation were a few big payments which had to be met at inopportune times of the year:
- Car tax is around 600 euro, so I was going to save 50 a month for the year to have enough set aside for this.
- There were a few other big payments I was also going to save for in separate wallets.
This type of segregated saving is just not possible in traditional banking:
- You can only get one account for funds
- You cannot share view access or create a joint account easily
- Anything you add costs money
- Often incurs significant FX fees
- Can't tag transactions
- It doesn’t use bitcoin so it's no fun
Would this experiment work, be convenient, be practical and make sense?
With the stability of bitcoin in recent months I was hoping volatility would not be an issue.
Copay could be a great app for saving. It has multisig wallets and you can create as many as you like to segregate your funds in the one app.
The motivation for using bitcoin for this experiment was simple
- I could ring fence the money for certain purposes
- I could easily share with my wife the balance and even make some funds multi sig if i wanted. (e.g. The holiday fund)
When it came to making a payment I would have several good options such as Xapo, Wirex or possibly Shake if it was ready.
When it came to payments with a bitcoin debit card in the real world there would be advantages too:
- It would be safe to use over the phone or internet because I could control how much was in the spendable account
- The use of multi sig would keep people in the loop when funds were being transferred to the spendable account
- I would get email notifications of transactions on the card
- FX transactions would not incur charges.
Do you use a debit card to spend Bitcoin?
In my next post I will share my experiences.
Why cant you segregate you bank funds i have a incoming account, a savings acc,a debit acc,a global bebit acc for use when i travel overseas that i load up when my dollar is good against the currencies im going to travel to and a credit acc all of theses i can transfer to and from in the one bank account .
I guess it depends on the bank.
You cant generally segregate or tag your funds into very specific buckets. My current bank for instance only lets you open at most 2 accounts; a savings account and a current account. I couldnt have one called "car fund", another called "holiday fund", another called "christmas fund". Do you see where I am going.
With the copay app you can even have multisig versions of these "funds" which is really interesting. Separating your funds like this also means that if your using something you dont fully trust like online purchases of if your travelling and there is a risk of your card being skimmed you can just expose that segregated fund and not your entire bank account which often is accessible via your bank issued debit card.
Yeah i see were your going and i agree .maybe the banking here is different my bebit card is only used for online stuff and l only load the amount im going to spend .my every day spending card has no chip so im not sure how it could be skimmed .but i have always worried about the credit cards getting skimmed.
Debit cards can be copied stolen or skimmed with or without chips as easily as credit cards. It happened to me about a year ago. My account was emptied. My bank covered the loss but it was only a small amount. I don't know if they have limits on what they would cover or not. My bank was really nice about it but this may not always be the case. They could blame you for not reporting a stolen card in time for example. In my case I didn't even know my card details had been stolen.
As I said at the start of the post though maybe I am just grasping at straws for use cases of bitcoin :)
Yes it happened to my parents a few years ago got done for 8 grand the bank paid them back but it took a few weeks to get the money . Sorry do you mean by skimming that the card reader has been replaced with a fake one or when some one uses a rfid device when they walk past you. In Australia the government will cover up to $ 250,000 grand i think for each account holder if the bank goes under .but not all banks have this protection. So may be the banks might work to that sort of figure
What i am referring to are where machines that copy your card. It can be atms or pos devices. I haven't encountered NFC devices copying your card yet thankfully but where I am based a lot of atms were stealing card info from people. I assume that is how I was scammed a few years ago as my card wasn't stolen.
When your just using you're card over the net or phone to pay for things there is a whole host of other ways to scam you.
I've been thinking about it too, I'd like to use a Wirex debit card for paypal.
However I also have an account with Coinjar, and it links directly with a bank account to deposit or withdraw. It also has coinjar swipe which is a Bitcoin debit card linked to a cash account.
With your savings as well though, Coinjar has a hedge account to protect against fluctuating bitcoin values.
For this experiment I was ignoring the volatility aspect and focusing on the practicality of the cards and using copay as a place for the funds. I haven't used coinjar but I did get some interesting insights which I will post about tomorrow. Stay tuned.
I have coinjar as well but i have not linked my bank .have you used there swipe card if so is it accepted everywhere ?
I haven't used coinjar but the cards all seem be similar from any provider. Either visa debit or MasterCard debit. They work anywhere the respective companies cards are accepted.
No, I don't have bitcoin debit card.