Sending Bitcoin to Exchange for Amazon Gift Cards By Using Virtual Credit Cards on Cryptopay.me for GBP, USD and Euro

so I had a requirement to send bitcoins I had into Amazon gift cards so I could finally complete on a basket of things I wanted to get. getting bitcoins converted to Amazon gift cards is not a straight forward thing when Amazon does not support crypto (will it ever?) so I went about looking for ways to do it, I came across some scary websites on google search that looks legit but actually when you check out their social media scream avoid straight away, I know if I had sent any bitcoins to them than I would have lost them straight away, I really don’t know how these companies, hosts get away with it but it’s straight up dodgy — we need our agencies to be more on top of those things, especially when they look so legit.

so the way I went about it, in the end, was quite simple, I sent some bitcoin from my exodus wallet into cryptopay.me (referral link btw) which took a while to process but I guess was done in thirty minutes or so and then transferred that internally to my virtual GBP credit card. I then used this virtual credit card to pay for my Amazon gift card top up — whatever top up to decide to do always put extra in that account because Amazon will do a verification check that it can take funds from the card using a text transaction amount which it will put back, on many occasions that have been £1 GBP. I think this is their way that the card exists and that they can draw funds from it.

at this stage, I wait and get an email from Amazon sometime later that the funds have been deposited to the gift card amount and that’s been applied to my account. you just shop as normal and when you come to pay out it will ask to use your gift card account fund to cover the costs of the basket. super straight forward and this just means that I can use bitcoins earned from mining to be able to pay for my Amazon requirements.

I did love at other methods like paxful which connects you in real time with a trader but it felt a little bit weird and I wanted the handoff to have as little human hands in the mix as possible, fewer links in the chain (in the analog sense) just allow me to do these things without waiting on people, I'd rather wait on systems any day over the unknown trader at the other end. I suggest you do the same unless you know and trust that person because once your coins are sent, they are gone.

another thing I should add was that I paid far too much for the network cost for this, it was like $4 or something but I just wanted to try as an experiment and I probably should have waited and sent a much larger amount, I had that the speed and price had come down with all hard forking and changes recently but it still seems to be quite high. I look forward to the day when they are quicker and cheaper, I think that will be when the real game changer of public adoption takes hold — it certainly feels like a bit of gamble when funds don’t appear straight away, we need better verification notifications for when things happen to build trust and it needs to be a consistent experience.

that’s one thing I really like about steemit, the short 3.5 second transaction windows for things to happen, sending funds to other people, sending to block trades, even selling on the market I've had a really good experience there and I love the fact that there are no fees for doing that internally, I love the fact that we can keep the value in the system by sending steem dollars and curation power as steem power to our friends and loved ones, I certainly feel it’s a feature that steemit should make more noise about in terms of maybe little saving accounts for family members.

oh and if you were wondering, I've ordered some thermal wrap insulation to try and be ready for winter by incorporating it into a side project I've been wanting to do, a case for the Pi camera so I can get a localised streaming network camera going for OBS and a set of induction ready pans — one for crepes and the other for frying up eggs again, I miss my scrambled eggs!

#exchange #amazon #giftcards #cryptopay