GIFTOFF.COM now is accepting ALT COINS again for GIFT CARD purchases, no more massive bitcoin charges, you will need to use wallet like electrum for payment however.
So I’ve used this service before, back in december I gave it a go and at first had problems ‘paying’ for the gift cards, I did’nt have a compatible wallet that allowed me to pay the bitpay payment process, it’s a dedicated payment protocol that they use that a handful of wallets support natively, you can literally copy and paste the link they provide (bitpay) and the wallet takes care of it.
head over to giftoff to spend some of your lovely alt coins on gift cards and upgrade your equipment to make you a better steemian today!
I downloaded the latest version of electrum (even thou they found a vulnerability in a version prior to the latest 3.0.5) which works perfectly for this task, because of that bug I would not suggest at this time of using electrum as a wallet that you use to store any level of volume in there, maybe just send over enough to cover your gift cards and do the transaction all in the same sitting.
I’ve bought ITUNES and AMAZON gift cards but when I went to grab an amazon one this morning I could not find it there, maybe they have taken that off for some reason but I found the amazon one the best, it’s probably wise to only load under £100 gift cards at a time, also I’ve found that it’s best to let it sit in there, be smart about loading regular gift cards and it’s probably best to leave them to the end of month instead of just loading up daily on them, dunno why I just feel you set of all kinds of algorithms ;)
update I did find amazon again after looking at my favourites list giftoff but I’m not sure why I can’t find it on the front page, even thou I found it says ‘This card currently is not available for purchase’ which is a little odd, I wonder why that is, hope they fix it.
so instead let’s buy a £20 iTunes voucher
my usual go to amazon top up for some reason is not available for purchase at the moment — they plug in alt coins and take away amazon, ain’t that always the way with upgrades to web systems, give you something you want but take away the very thing that made the service useful! :)
As you can see once you click on payment you get the options to pay with a credit card and earn platform points, pay with bitcoin which brings up a bitpay method, if you have your bitcoin on a mobile with bitpay you can straight scan the qr code there or just copy the link and paste that into electrum to send, it’s actually super straight forward to do.
If you select alt coins to pay with however you get a stack of coins that are listed and some are greyed out, right now however you can pay with the following alt coins — 0x, Aragon, augur, bancor, bat, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, blackchin, civic, clams, dash, digibyte, district0x, dogecoin, edgeless, Eos, ether, ether classic, factoids, firstblood, funfair, game credits, gnosis, golem, iexec, Komodo, lbry, litecoin, matchpool, numeraire, omisego, potcoin, reddcoin, ripio, salt, startcoin, status, storj, swarmcity, vertcoin, waves, wetrust, wings and finally zcash! :)
Wow, that’s quite a bunch of alt coins supported, I’m gonna use dash today because I bought at $800 recently and I’ve managed to make a little bit of profit over the amount I bought and I’ve got an SBD payout in a little while anyway so I can cover this for the test.
once you select dash you have to put in your refund address, I presume if something goes wrong but it’s standard practice when using shapeshift to do these kind of transactions, this is what it uses and you can see below that now we have ten minutes to complete this transaction.
At every step they make it super clear to what you have to do, I was really surprised how easy this was to do, it’s amazing that we can use our alt coins to pay for things with a minimal charge for the send and to use the network, it really made no sense to pay for things with bitcoin in it’s current state — that may change with atomic swaps but we will have to see.
gift off have done an incredible job here making this work. I know they have put a message that it took a lot of work, long nights to pull it off but just the amount of alt coins they are supporting and the easy to use system make them a pretty attractive web site service for prospective investors to maybe look about acquiring so get at it while you can — fantastic service.
When was the last time your network fee was $0.02 to do a transaction on bitcoin, man it feels good to be able to flex these alt coin muscles and not get screwed for the transaction, it certainly feels like the act of using crypto currency increases when you have services like this working so easily.
Next you get a lovely message after you have done the transfer and literally about five minutes after that I got the email that the order had been received at this point I can expect to see my code to ‘top-up’ my apple iTunes account in my dashboard over on giftoff — it’s a dream to use!
and just like that we are done, now that it has alt-coins for accepting payments I can see myself using gift cards a lot more, this opens up massively the scope for the homeless projects to gift forward account codes and cards for people in transition or on the streets.
to be able to get something to eat today, imagine getting someone a prime account, delivering food parcels to amazon lockers, money for a coffee in a local coffee shop (at least in the uk here to start) — this is the real revolution.
please note that this a UK service only i believe, that is that the gift cards are for services in the uk, i do hope they bring back amazon gift cards at some point, that would be the true game changer!
bought myself a subscription to the second markdown editor i use for all my 'alt-accounts' here on steemit because it has folder support, i really wanted to pay for the yearly account at £35 but don't have that much but at least that £20 will pay for the next four months until i can afford to pay for the year -- always be upgrading the tools you need to get the job done!
update
the amazon card loading is returned, i asked them on twitter about it, sent them the link to this post which they loved, i'll put it in the comments below. they seem like a really receptive web company with a great developer behind it, the shapeshift intergration is divine! :) -- seems they have a 'float' for funds and they i presume the crypto payments go back into that and get converted etc, you know like putting up capital and then replacing it -- i love this service.
I've been looking for hope and this is a glimpse of it. Although I am in Germany I am looking forward to more services and even steemit itself offering choices to rid the #bitcoindependency. Why hasn't steemit done such a thing already? All the money lost through bitcoin transfactions could have enriched the steemit platform more.
Also looking forward to being able to buy bigger things like a house in the future without having to transfer money to banks firtst. Housegiftcards? 😎😄
edit
Nvm! Cant find steem
steem is not on there but a TON of other ALT coins are. i used dash and the fees were super low. trust me this is progress! :) -- steemit is not going to build the third party gateways but instead concentrate on their own website and optimizing and feeding into the community the way it does, we do have a bunch more devs thou jumping on board all the time.
Nice you post blog @teamhumble
Good job
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That is top information and a great tutorial. Thanks. I read last week about a similar service for US only but it only accepted bitcoin and had only a very small choice of cards. This is a million times better. Open source shopping and gifting. Finally the cryptos are coming of age one step at a time.
Do you know of anyone pulling together a full resource of companies and shops that accept crypto as payment please ?
Your idea of people leaving gifts in amazon lockers is insanely brilliant, I need to look into whether it would work in SE Asia.
As for Thailand particularly, I use coins.co.th (also in philippines) which is amazing. sadly they only use bitcoin, and the transaction fee is a little pricey, but I can pay the electric bill, get phone credit...loads of useful daily spending tasks direcetly using the crypto in a wallet I have with them.
This is the future, and 'the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades' :-)
Regards Mr Humble and family :-)
exciting ain't it? finally we can live like we want, putting in our value where it's needed, sidestepping crappy technologies and actually use the ones we want to use and support those eco systems. thanks for the props -- yeah i've got massive ideas bubbling about amazon lockers :) -- just getting new kit to be able to record stuff and i'll be all over it! :)
i've started an account @cryptocards which i think i'll extend to giftcards too, it's coming. bit by bit! :) -- i just paid the subscription on the ulysses markdown editor so i can easily deal with all these accounts :)
In philippines back in 2007 there was a small project set up to provide public street lockers just as safe storage points for the local homeless to keep their few bits of stuff safe, sadly it didnt get far.
Which brings me on to old fridges, which we have in Thailand at many motorcycle taxi stands, used as free exchange libraries. Im not sure the take up, I know I keep chucking a few english books in my local one, but I think the upcycling possiblities of old fridges are endless !!
Problem here in UK of course are short sighted local councils with their planning department and health and safety jobsworths, not to mention the Nimbys, but imagine dropping fridges in strategic locations to use as drop off points for food and covered in info stickers with advice and phone numbers for any issues the homeless have.
totally right, i worked for a council for five years in a computer department so i know what it's like first hand. you did see my post on the hunger project vending machine right? that's got legs and they got back in touch via instagram so that might go somewhere, of course i'll keep everyone up to date here.
btw, adding you to my steem auto voter.
I started writing the longest comment in the world so decided to make a blog post of it, please take a quick look. I stuck in a reference to you vending machine article :-)
Thanks for giving me my cause back!
not a problem man ;) will read :)
This is badass. I can't wait for steem to start being accepted by more and more merchants. The only problem I see right now is that you need to have your Steem powered up in order to have influence, but you need liquid steem or SBD in order to make purchases. I wonder if there is a way to get around this in the future
well, my own personal goal is 5000 steem power, then i can quite easily cover all my dailys, weeklys and save towards bigger monthlys while working daily here and recording my courses and improving my residuals -- if SBD stays at this i just play a 50/50 split between powering up and taking out some earnings to help funds little services like this, the less things i have to buy with my residuals the more i have to put into much bigger projects, concepts and ideas and i can finally pay for a decent coder to take my ideas and bring them to life! :) -- i have some awesome things planned for this year.
I hear ya. I have a goal of 15k SP by years end, which is doable with lot of work, but also going to offset that by purchasing some more steem. I can only see the price continuing to rise as we move forward and more applications and use cases are created for the steem ecosystem. SBD being as high as it is right now is beautiful, making each post and upvote that much more rewarding. Keep it up bud, looking forward to seeing your future works
cheers brother. yep, onwards and upwards, taking the gains when i can, powering up as i go, making those connections. i love daily blogging here.
You and me both. A year from now, we will be reaping the rewards of the efforts we are putting in now
the rewards for me are both financial and communitive. i've never felt such a lovely remote audience of people that i can consider friends. the nodes of the human network are restoring! :)
Great news for altcoin ,guess if someone is still outthere been scared of crytoworld ,,please change your mind
I was trying a similar service from E-gift who accepts bitcoin as payment but the giftcard can only be used to purchase goods within the US. Most of my friends and family are in EU so I see no way I could get them one of those gift card. I wonder if their service can be used worldwide though. I am just going to bookmark this article if in future I need to do some shopping.
Plus, I love this more cause they have various alt coins :D not only bitcoin with a crazy fee!
yeah the altcoin support is amazing! :)
WHOOPS and I just realized I saw amazon.UK ! I am going to try it :D for sure
That is very helpful... I was just looking some posts about about this. Thanks for sharing! Followed! Hugs from Spain!
well there you go! hugs back from the uk to my spanish buddies! :)
We escaped from London just 5 months ago... :) Best place for retired people! My sciatica already almost gone!
https://twitter.com/philcampbell/status/955398201200250881
Good post friend