
Ask HN: Where do you spend Bitcoins? - emilepetrone
I&#x27;ve heard from store&#x2F;marketplace owners that have implemented BTC that they get very few transactions through BTC.  As the founder of an online marketplace, [Tindie](http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tindie.com), I&#x27;m very interested in learning if adding BTC checkout has a dramatic impact on sales.<p>My suspicion, which I think many BTC skeptics hold, is that most BTC transactions are more for currency conversions than purchasing goods.<p>HN, where are you spending your bitcoins? Maybe I&#x27;ve got my head in the sand, and bc I don&#x27;t own any BTCs, just don&#x27;t notice the places you can spend them?<p>(Any store&#x2F;marketplace operators I&#x27;m also interested to hear your experiences post implementing BTC checkout).
======
cheeze
I buy reddit gold[1], Amazon giftcards[2] (with 3% cashback!), grilled cheese
sandwiches[3], belgian waffles [4], donate to causes[5], and will be booking a
flight[6] using them soon. I also use BTC/LTC for personal payments between
friends and co-workers pretty often.

[1] [https://ssl.reddit.com/gold](https://ssl.reddit.com/gold)

[2] [http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/](http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-
gift-cards/)

[3]
[http://wizardsofcheese.com/wizardscreed.html](http://wizardsofcheese.com/wizardscreed.html)

[4]
[https://www.facebook.com/thewaflstop](https://www.facebook.com/thewaflstop)

[5] [http://seansoutpost.com/](http://seansoutpost.com/)

[6] [http://www.cheapair.com/](http://www.cheapair.com/)

~~~
cypherpunks01
Booking a flight with bitcoin.. Doesn't that seem even more suspect than
booking a flight with cash?

~~~
superuser2
He'll still have to provide ID documentation to get on the plane (and I think
also to book the flight, under the TSA Secure Flight program) so in practice
the government doesn't lose any information here. It might raise suspicion,
but he doesn't gain any anonymity.

------
ISL
I'd been planning to head over to a local food truck this week until the
market became too volatile; nobody knows how to price things. If BTC becomes a
functional currency, it'll be when the price is stable to better than 10% over
week-to-month timescales. That has happened in the past.

In general, I'd much rather give value to a vendor than play the credit-card
--> reward points --> $ game to reduce the effective cost of the charges
credit-card companies levy on vendors.

Every time I write and mail a check or arrange for a bank balance transfer, I
think "Man, if only the person at the other end used bitcoin. This would be
faster, easier, and cheaper." It's so much easier for person-to-person
transfers than carrying cash, making change, etc. You can also get a sense for
how much practical use bitcoin is getting by searching Craigslist for
"Bitcoin".

At the moment, there aren't that many places to spend them. The economic
exchange systems we have today are quite good. It remains to be seen if any
other system is ultimately superior.

~~~
sejje
In my local craigslist, there are 9 results.

One was an email address, so false result, and 3 more were not real goods,
rather offers to buy/sell bitcoin itself.

------
epaga
Actually just ordered out this evening, bought my family of 6 dinner (sushi,
etc.) for 0.046 BTC at [http://lieferservice.de](http://lieferservice.de)
which supports hundreds of restaurants throughout Germany.

We keep an "order out" Bitcoin budget and refill it with new Bitcoins from
time to time. REALLY cheap food due to the BTC prices as of late.

~~~
shazow
+1, I ordered dinner using Bitcoin from a nice Greek place via
lieferservice.de when I was staying in Berlin—perfect experience.

------
M4v3R
It definitely won't hurt you, implementing Bitcoin payments isn't very hard
and you usually don't pay anything to get started. You could also get free
publicity if you have a good item listing and accept Bitcoin, because still
not so many marketplaces do that.

------
btcus
I apologize for blatant advertising, but my colleague and I run
[https://www.bitcoinshop.us](https://www.bitcoinshop.us), an attempt to host a
vast amount of inventory available for purchase with BTC. If anyone has any
comments or suggestions on how to improve our service, we would appreciate it
very, very much!

I've lurked on HN for quite some time, but could not pass up this opportunity
to obtain feedback from such an excellent community.

------
user24
I have spent a little at [http://takeaway.com](http://takeaway.com) in the UK,
but I'm primarily seeing it as an investment.

I know that we also need to start spending it for it to have any real value,
so my wife and I agree that as of January we're going to start putting our
takeaway funds into bitcoin and gradually spending that, while also keeping
some aside as an investment.

~~~
VMG
[http://www.lieferdienst.de](http://www.lieferdienst.de) in Germany

------
pitzips
I implemented BTC checkout with giftcardzen.com (We sell discounted gift cards
to all major retailers) To be honest, working with coinbase was lackluster.
One ridiculous thing that coinbase did, was delete the post back url if they
didn't receive a 200 response. So, if the site happened to be down for 1
minute when it posted...the subsequent posts would just go into a void.

Other than that, make sure you have some BTC pre-purchased in the event you
need to do an equivalent of a refund. The BTC that comes in through checkout,
can not be used if the customer needs that BTC back.

~~~
michaelt
Interesting, thanks posting.

Roughly how many $ of bitcoin sales do you do?

A lot of Bitcoin-related services seem kind of sketchy - they get hacked or
disappear with a bunch of other people's bitcoins. What sort of steps have you
taken to protect yourselves / minimize your exposure to the risk your payment
processor will get hacked?

------
waterlesscloud
It's not going to have a dramatic impact on your sales. Not a lot of people
are going to pay you with bitcoin today, and of those who would, most of them
would have used another payment method if you didn't accept bitcoin.

It's fairly irrelevant to you as a vendor whether most transactions are
currency conversion, though. Who cares? What matters to you is your bottom
line, not what the economy as a whole looks like.

What actually matters is how much it costs you to implement vs how much extra
revenue it brings you. Given that it wouldn't cost much at all, why not add
it?

~~~
jaxn
vs how much you can lose from market volatility.

The thing that would scare me about accepting bit coin for transactions is
that in a scenario where BTC is rapidly losing value, it would be easy for
lots of orders to be placed in a short amount of time.

~~~
nly
Afaik Bitpay basically guarantee the what you get as a merchant. Your price
your stuff in US$ and it's converted to Bitcoin at the checkout at a rate they
are willing to sell them at (presumably on the open market)

e.g. I just tried to buy 36 months of reddit gold at $89.97, which came up as
0.10454514 BTC = $860/BTC... which is almost exactly the trading rate on
Bitstamp.

~~~
bennyg
Yeah, but you have to pretty much turn that money back into cash ASAP if the
value of BTC is dropping, or else someone pays you 1 BTC for something and
that's worth ~$800 one day and $100 another. If it's just in an account,
you've lost a lot of value, right?

~~~
bdcs
You can use bitcoin as a payment network so that you have zero bitcoin price
exposure. Truly none.

For example, with BitPay your POS terminal tells a price denominated in USD to
BitPay, (BitPay quotes a bitcoin-denominated price to the customer with a
unique address and the customer pays), and then BitPay tells the merchant the
payment came through. BitPay credits the merchant account the USD-denominated
value. At the end of the day, BitPay settles up the account (eg. ACH payment
to merchant bank account).

Never does the merchant hold bitcoins.

------
bdcs
About once a week I'll settle up with friends using BTC out of convenience
and, to be honest, novelty. For example, at a restaurant instead of splitting
a bill across 6 cards, one person will pay and the other 5 will send btc for
their amount (cash's divisibility is a problem).

About once a month I'll use Gyft to buy something on Amazon to get the 3%
back.

I also buy a VPN, PrivateInternetAccess, using bitcoins.

------
rms
>My suspicion, which I think many BTC skeptics hold, is that most BTC
transactions are more for currency conversions than purchasing goods.

We get about one BTC order a week at my store and then hold our bitcoins
rather than immediately cashing out for USD. The largest orders were from
someone who told us overtly that they were basically making orders from us as
a way of cashing out their bitcoins.

------
sard420
Going to spend mine on consumer electronics. It's hard though not even a few
months ago I threw in 50$ and bought at $124. Spent a little, but now my BTC
is worth over $250. I know it could be worth $15 tomorrow but still three
LCD's for $50 sounds right up my ally.

------
tjaerv
I buy all my domain names at Namecheap.com with bitcoin.

------
quantabytes
[https://www.bitcoinstore.com](https://www.bitcoinstore.com)

------
aivaomo
So far I've bought domain renewals at Namecheap and a few rounds at the pub.
Both faster and easier than paying by card. I intend to buy my next flights at
btctrip.com.

I'm aware BTC's appreciating value so I periodically top up to offset
spending.

------
analog31
As an add-on question, how do stores or online retailers set prices in BTC's?
It would seem that you'd need to have indexed prices (like wages in some high
inflation countries) to know what you're actually charging for something.

~~~
Risse
At our store at bitelectronics.net, we set the prices in USD, then with cron
we update the price every 15 minutes. This is done by using a average sell
rate from Mt.Gox.

------
y1611
I used to spend them at Silk Road, when I was regularly using Ritalin to perk
my mind up a bit after a close bereavement that decimated my capacity for
mental work.

Also bought a domain name at Namecheap, which I was going to use for a Bitcoin
mixing service which worked by moving such transactions through SR's mixer.

But then when SR was shut down I was left with a few BTC that I had no reason
to use. Just cashed out at ~$800/BTC, which paid for all my drug purchases and
the failed mixing website experiment - with a very small profit.

I think I'm done with Bitcoin now. It has no use to me as a currency as
everything I'd want to purchase now I can use real money for.

------
modeless
You won't get many bitcoin sales right now, especially with the market being
so volatile over the past few weeks, but the integration should be pretty easy
and you might get some good publicity out of it. Posts about stores accepting
bitcoin generally attract quite a few upvotes on the bitcoin subreddit.

Also, if you keep the money in bitcoins, you could gain if the price keeps
rising, making your bitcoin sales worth more. Of course, that's a risky bet,
but the potential upside is still 10x-100x over the next few years.

------
peteyPete
+1 People should support vendors which accept bitcoin by making it public that
they paid with bitcoin @ X store. I made paidwithbitcoin.com a while back. I
still think its a good idea. People should tweet #paidwithbitcoin and mention
the website where they bought. Would make it super easy to build listings of
sites which accept them from all the tweets.

To answer the original question, I've recently used bitcoin to pay for my VPN
subscription @ hidemyass.com

------
Artemis2
Currently, I spend them only on the Humble Bundle (okay, I don't have much).

I advise you to look at Coinbase API if you want to implement checkout using
BTCs.

------
ElongatedTowel
I bought a domain with it. Although I'm not quite fond of the potential
traceability. I earned the money by playing poker. In a way someone could link
my personal information I had to give up to make the purchase to my poker
habits and the guy who sold me the initial bitcoin in the first place who
might or might not be a marijuana dealer.

------
terhechte
I bought VPN access with bitcoin around a year ago. I would have used it more
often in the past, but most of the time when I wanted to buy / pay something
online they had no support for Bitcoin, but support for Paypal, so I still use
Paypal more. I guess if there's more uptake, I may chose Bitcoin in those
situations more often.

~~~
stanmancan
Back when BTC was ~$10 I was going to purchase 20 or so but decided on another
VPN provider and never ended up buying them. Oops!

------
base698
This is handy: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/11/20...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/11/20/shut-up-and-take-my-bitcoins-a-map-of-bitcoin-friendly-
businesses/)

Several businesses around me I wasn't aware of take it.

------
001sky
Its hard to justify its use as a transactional currency when its capital
appreciation is so high. Perhaps the adjacent question is "why spend it on
_anything_ "? At the moment...this may impact the evolution of transactional
infrastucture...in terms of ROI (when timing is considered).

~~~
taylored
By that logic wouldn't it best to buy everything possible through bitcoin?
i.e. transfer fiat you would spend on products to bitcoin and enjoy
deflationary prices

~~~
mrweasel
I don't think that entirely how the economics work. If you transfer your EUR,
USD, whatever to Bitcoin, it would make sense to delay any purchases to next
week/month/year, because you would at this point get more value for your
Bitcoins. This is bad for any retail that's not sell food or other essentials,
where you can't delay the purchase.

When you see government and national bank attempt to pump out money, they are
trying to do the opposite. This means that if you want to buy a new TV there's
no point in waiting, you won't get a significantly better deal next month.

Bitcoins are still a bit weird, because you currently can't cash in large
sums. You can't do your transactions in Bitcoin, you need a stable proxy
currency for setting the value of your goods. We have maybe 8000 active
products currently, all manually price in five difference currencies to
maximize profit. This only works because these currencies are pretty stable
and we can avoid adjusting the price for a product after a few month after
initial release. It priced in Bitcoin, we would have to adjust the price of
every single item multiple time a day. Of cause given the price fluctuation it
would still be more profitable to simple buy Bitcoins, rather than physical
goods and the later sell them... But that would be bad for employment.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Bitcoin, precisely for the reason other people like it.
I believe that governments need to be able to control currencies. If you don't
trust your government, then that's a different problem.

~~~
Jd
Would it be valuable to you to have a single base currency in which prices are
set (i.e. with a rate derived from the composite of underlying currencies),
which then automatically sets the prices in the other currencies? I ask you
partially because we are developing something like that and I'm not super
aware of how large e-commerce providers handle this problem.

~~~
mrweasel
No, not valuable at all. I thought that it would make sense to, initially.

You want to set the price in each marked separately, finding the maximum price
for that product in the given market. A product you can sell for say £10 in
the UK, might sell equally well for the equivalent of £12 or even £15 in
Scandinavia. You could sell the item for the £10 in every country, but why
miss out on the profit?

Just using an exchange rate won't take the market (competition) and purchasing
power in the different countries. Also you'll end up fighting sells personal
who will want to be able to set the sales price, or set them as dictated by
the suppliers ( it's technically illegal in many countries, but very few are
willing to fight the suppliers, so you need to support it ).

Even in the Euro countries you'll want to be able to price a product
differently in each country.

------
shazow
Just found this:
[http://www.bitcoinblackfriday.com/](http://www.bitcoinblackfriday.com/)

Basically a mailing list of merchants who accept Bitcoin and are doing special
Black Friday sales end of this month. Probably of interest to people in this
thread.

------
stungeye
FYI: CaVirtex (a Canadian BTC exchange) is holding a $500 shopping cart
integration contest to attract developers to their API.

[https://www.cavirtex.com/news](https://www.cavirtex.com/news)

------
kmfrk
A lot of people in bitcoin discussions online tend to bring up
[http://www.gyft.com](http://www.gyft.com), but maybe things spend their BTC
on other things in private. :)

------
pearjuice
>buying anything with Bitcoin

>2013

Why would anyone do this? Tomorrow you could buy two of the thing you bought
today. At this moment in time Bitcoin is not a viable currency and you would
be foolish to spend it like that.

~~~
bdcs
You asked why anyone would buy something with Bitcoin. Imagine you buy
something on Amazon, you can buy bitcoins (with a 1% fee) at coinbase, and use
Gyft which gives you 3% back. You end up getting (1+3%)/(1+1%) ~ 2% back.

You can also always replenish your bitcoin holdings at the end of the day, if
you want to maintain a certain amount of bitcoin exposure.

------
letney
Gyft.com is my go to place for instant conversion of BTC to a medium (a gift
card) I can spend in my local Target or CVS Pharmacy. Their reward system
rebates 3% of BTC purchases.

------
rvcamo
I bought subway with mine: [https://medium.com/this-happened-to-
me/48c233e67ddc](https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/48c233e67ddc)

------
nikoftime
[https://bitdazzle.com](https://bitdazzle.com) has products from hundreds
(thousands?) of merchants, and you can buy any of them with Bitcoin.

------
reedlaw
Gyft.com is a great place to buy gift certificates with bitcoin. Massdrop.com
has some great deals on electronics, including Yubikeys, 3D printers, and
audio equipment.

------
selkisr
coinmap.org has a pretty slick interface for people to search for brick and
mortar businesses accepting bitcoin. Although it is incomplete. It would be
nice to have BitPay and Coinbase share their merchant data with coinmap so the
industry has a better, complete search tool for consumers. Only way to promote
consumer appetite to spend vs. hoard bitcoin is with better awareness of
merchant acceptance.

------
gojomo
The future.

------
alasdair_
I just bought a bunch of (physical) magic: the gathering cards from
abugames.com

------
carbonmachine
Related question: How do you all earn bitcoins aside from mining?

~~~
sejje
You purchase them on exchanges (or from individuals).

------
cheesylard
I used it to donate to What.CD and buy a Namecheap domain.

------
spaceman77
2 Raspberry Pi kits at Bitcoinin.

VPN services at PIA.

Donation to LibreOffice.

------
achalkley
Reddit gold.

About to use some on Adafruit products.

------
ted0
Namecheap - domains, ssls, hosting

