COINBASE: An alternative to those who find their Bitpay VISA worthless with the change in deposits

I wrote several posts the other day about how Bitpay is pretty much worthless as a card to me now once they started requiring the new form of adding funds to it that essentially creates a double dipping of fees when needing to add to it from a place like an exchange. If your funds just went straight to that wallet then you'd get only a single VERY expensive fee. I couldn't even withdraw $138 to my card as it said I had insufficient funds.

This sent me on a quest to find an alternative. There are several, but I am in the United States so services such as UQUID are not available to me. I kept seeing reference to the SHIFT card and that it connects to Coinbase. I had Coinbase over a year ago, but stopped using it when they greatly increased their identification requirements. Well, the exchanges have since increased their identification requirements too so it just took awhile for them to catch up.

The SHIFT card then sounds nice too because it can connect to different wallets at Coinbase. Currently that is Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. NICE: So I can use some other currency besides Bitcoin to add to my card and ALL of them have significantly lower fees.

That sounds like a plan. I ordered a SHIFT card the other day and it will arrive in 5 to 10 days. Yet that leaves me with no way to tap into my funds when I was planning on doing some last minute Christmas shopping.

Today I started wondering if there was anyway to convert Crypto to Paypal as I do have a Paypal account and then I would have some money now to complete my shopping.

In searching for that Coinbase came up again. It turns out you CAN attach your Coinbase account to a paypal account.

You can then SELL your crypto and it'll be deposited to Paypal within 24 hours.

I proceeded to put that to the test. I sent 3 Litecoin from Bittrex to Coinbase. The bittrex withdrawal fee was 0.001 LTC. Litecoin was $300 at the time. So that fee was $0.30. Already a gigantic improvement over bitcoin.

It was there fast.

I then pulled 1 litecoin out to my paypal and it tells you straight up what the fees will be. I believe Coinbase charges 3.5% to convert to paypal. I ended up with $289 sent to my paypal. It said the funds would be deposited tomorrow on Sunday. I thought that at least I'd be able to do some shopping tomorrow. I went ahead and sent some Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash too in order to see how they transfer. Litecoin was the fastest of those three. Ethereum ended up being faster than Bitcoin Cash.

I went and looked at my Paypal account and the funds had already been deposited.

Really?

I decided to try it again and I deposited another litecoin in paypal. I was watching this time though and I refreshed my browser. It took about 30 seconds for it to show up in my paypal.

I wanted to write this post as a heads up for the rest of you that might be having problems and a need to overcome them now like I was.

I will tell you I'll likely not be sending Bitcoin anywhere at this point. The fees make that stupid. I'll instead convert it to another currency like Litecoin and then send that as well. The price to convert/exchange is significantly less than the bitcoin fees.

Bitpay making my bitpay VISA worthless may actually have ended up being a boon as it forced me to seek out and find better options.

I saw that the people doing Bitpay are working on a Litepay for Litecoin which is not available until February, but I may not need that particular service.

Anyway... Merry Christmas my Steemit friends. I hope this stream of consciousness post is of some use to some of you.