Buying Gift Cards with HIVE
I know you probably read the title and thought to yourself, "What does The Bitcoin Company have to do with buying gift cards with HIVE?". That's a fair first thought, and honestly I had the same reaction when I discovered this. I was on a quest to buy a gift card for the Playstation store but only wanted to use HIVE or HBD for the task to make it fun. After a little googling and finding a dead website called Hive Gift Cards, I stumbled upon an article showing how to buy prepaid VISA cards with HIVE. Aside from that, there really wasn't much out there.
With the @v4vapp, we can use HIVE or HBD to pay Bitcoin Lightning invoices, which is what The Bitcoin Company generates for payments. Thus, we are able to spend HIVE or HBD on gift cards through the website. I though this was really fucking cool, so I gave it a go. Not only did it work, but I earned 2.5% cashback in Bitcoin at the same time! I hate spending crypto in general but I wanted to give this a try and make an easy guide for people that might want to spend some HIVE in the future without an exchange in the middle.
I'd like to give a shoutout to @brianoflondon for making this possible! This is truly a powerful tool for the Hive ecosystem, and we should all be in full support of it. I encourage you to vote on the V4V app funding proposal to continue funding and development of the service. This doesn't cost you anything, and every single vote counts. It literally takes 2 clicks. Anyway - on to the guide/experience.
First, head to The Bitcoin Company app and select which gift card you would like to purchase then select the amount. Then click "Continue with Purchase". Different stores have different amounts of cash back, so pay attention to that.
After clicking "Continue with Purchase", you'll get an estimate of the price and an estimate of BTC you'll earn in cash back. If you have any BTC in your wallet, you can apply that to the purchase as well. If you use my referral code H2Z11P at sign up, you'll get 1000 Satoshis you can apply to the purchase.
Select Pay with, and select Bitcoin then "Confirm Purchase".
After clicking "Confirm Purchase", your invoice will be generated. Since we will be using the V4V app to pay the invoice with Hive, there's no need to get a Lightning wallet. Just click Copy next to the Invoice ID.
Now head to the V4V app and paste the Invoice ID.
Once you paste the Invoice ID, it will calculate the cost in HIVE or HBD. Select which you would like to use to pay the invoice and you'll get a prompt to sign with Hive Signer or Hive Keychain. I did this through the Hive Keychain app on Mobile, but you can do the same on desktop.
After signing the transaction, head back to The Bitcoin Company app, and you invoice will be paid in a few seconds. Then your gift card will be shown.
don't bother trying to redeem it, it has already been redeemed
As you can see, I earned an additional 7,297 satoshis that can be used toward future purchases. Pretty awesome. Spent HIVE and earned BTC.
Overall, this is incredibly easy and I had a great experience. Hopefully you learned something useful from my exploration of these platforms. Now I'm off to take some medicine and play some Sonic Frontiers.
If you know of other places we can spend our HIVE without dealing with an exchange, let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading! Much love.
Wanna learn about all kinds of things you can do with the crypto you earn blogging on Hive? Check out my index - Learn Crypto Stuff for some fun educational crypto stuff.
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