Steem Giftcards- Successful purchase!
So, I'm all about seeing Steem get into the world at large. Not just the crypto land, but also into the terrestrial world as well. I'm very keen on the idea that I can live, work, and function off of crypto. I essentially believe the world is run by immoral banksters, and they operate the Federal Reserve. Every time I use a dollar I give it value, and I would prefer alternatives. Another one arrived today.
@steemgiftcards
Just launched their account and their website.
I feel an obligation to try these things
I'm getting witness rewards. I should risk some of those to test things out to help the ecosystem. So, that's what I did. I purchased a $100 amazon gift card. It had $9.95 in fees. At the time I paid 21.8SBD.
I paid using Steem connect. Then nothing happened right away.
A few minutes later
I got confirmation from them by email-
and a few minutes after that I got the actual giftcard.
I passed it along to muh wife, and now we have $100 more sitting in an Amazon account. Seems like an excellent way to turn Steem into tangible goods with just a few clicks.
Nice job @xtrodinarypilot and team.
What a fitting meme! People have actually asked "which color pill did you take?" while I discussed the impending industry disruptions of blockchain. And by the end of the conversation, they had already changed their tune and recently bragged about buying during this crypto sale.
Thank you for utilizing your rewards to support these important advancements with the steem blockchain. Hodlers love to bring up the billion dollar bitcoin pizzas but we all know that the purchase of goods and services with the currency is important to its value as well. Thanks!
Hey, if crypto is the red pill, I think I'd take it again and again if I had to re-choose.
We can keep taking em and sharing em with more minds! Wheeee (steem) blockchain!
Ethereum talks big about having the biggest community, they say as an example that more than half of the too 100 coins are ERC20 tokens.. I dont think those ERC20 coins are necessarily supporting the coin..
Steem on the other hand has 100s of website that just support the steem blockchain. There are community created apps, and websites that do all kinds of things.
Steem community is the most robust community any crypto coin could hope for!!
that's my take too
Oh man this is great news. I've been trying to figure out a streamlined way to spend a couple rewards -- and one of the things I have in mind is an affordable drone, which would let me get higher quality content into my climbing blog. Instead of having to go through additional steps with exchanges, being able to get an amazon giftcard so easily is HUGE.
Thanks for taking a bit of a leap and testing it out. Despite my reservations about amazon, it's hard to ignore that they're the easiest way to get a lot of items. Hopefully a decentralized market place will start to get a bit of traction in this space -- but I think that's a long ways off for the time being.
Couldn't people be encouraged to start up online shops directly on steemit ? If steemit could offer us some sort of escrow service to encourage transparency and trust, direct exchanges via blocktrade maybe ?
I think this will happen eventually. Or at least online stores that can be listed to this site for transferring steem and sbd to gift cards. But imagine one day when there is a “SteemShop” and you can link your account and pay for items directly. Wow. The future looks great. I wish. Was a developer and could do these things
I think with the upcoming SMT update, there's going to be a lot of innovation happening in this regard. I can imagine a lot of markets developing on here in the coming year. I know for excample, that myself and @caitycat are interesting in setting up a photography / art print store, and I think it would amazing to have SMT based "certificates of authenticity" that are produced with each numbered print. Blockchain verified art.
We're in the future, y'all.
Yeah. That sounds pretty cool. The opportunities are endless
Good luck with that! Its like a whole new internet is opening up before our eyes !
Oh wow, this is brilliant! Some of the best news I've heard in my short time in Steemit. Looking forward to building up that bank and give these gift cards to my wife too. Happy wife happy life and all :)
This could be such a huge win for anyone investing their time into Steemit. not only to see it grow but getting the payback of these cards too.
Such a win across the board!
This is awesome. Will try out too.♨️🚀
Glad you've tried it: i saw your resteem of the original post about the gift cards and that got me curious. Glad you've followed through!
Nice experiment and it definitely goes into the right direction!
This is they way it should go - but there will be the day when amazon will not be able to afford to not accept crypto currencies. To be honest, I would hope that some day nobody would do business on amazon anymore but instead sell their good over the blockchain...
Thank you for doing the test for us.
That $10 fee seems really high, but it is not really. Not compared to the fees of getting it through an exchange into a bank.
What would be better is if more online stores took cryptos directly.
I have been working on the definition of a enterprise level wallet would be.
Businesses need a lot more than just a password protection on their funds. They need to be able to delegate to people to spend cryptos, or to put in a "purchase request" to be reviewed and approved, to spend cryptos.
And then, you need the refund mechanism almost automated, which means being tied into the emails, and the store database back end, and...
I really would like a stand alone piece that would plug into the various parts of an online store. I want to avoid writing something so monolithic.
I think the fee is definitely too high. Exchanges and such are more expensive but that’s a whole nother issue.
This said I might be getting myself a gift card soon too lol. Awesome initiative @steemgiftcards!
Hey. This is actually pretty cool. It helps you avoid going through exchanges like Coinbase to get out. You can essentially cash out all your crypto into steem, and then transfer it like you did. Awesome. Hopefully this is a long term program and doesn’t stop any time soon. Thanks for this because I’ve been trying to figure out how i would cash out one day. But with crypto, ill hold for a long time. No point in cashing out with minimal gains.
My crypto is money that i can live without. But it would be great to have it when its worth a lot lol
The fees through this method are still pretty hefty, but better than an exchange