Download the Wallet of Satoshi App or (if you care, as I do, about having custody of your bitcoin private keys) the app Muun. Deposit some bitcoin (lets say $500) from your exchange or your hardware wallet into that App. This should cost $10 or so but it can cost less if your hardware wallet allows you to choose the fee, then you can put a low value such as $1 and wait a few days (I have executed several transactions paying $0.5 or less in the last 30 days, it took 1-2 days in most cases). Now with the app funded head over to https://www.bitrefill.com/, now you can choose whether to buy Amazon, Walmart, Apple gift cards or Uber cash, pay for Airbnb or a gazzilion other options. Choose BTC Lightning as payment method. The website will show you a QR code, on the Wallet of Satoshi click send, scan the QR code and send the funds. The website will instantly detect the payment and give you the gift card. The fee cost of that will be almost neglegible (like a few cents at most) Visa can conduct 65,000 transactions a second, Bitcoin lightning can do millions. It isn't that Bitcoin sucks as a payment method and it is stuck as a store of value but rather, as a payment system its just so good governments are going to come after it. Those purchases at bitrefill are not recorded at the blockchain, the lightning network has a onion routing style system to prevent lightning channels to know where the money came from and where it is going. Anonimity tools like TOR can be used to browse that website so it never knows who you are. Bitcoin doesnt suck as a payment method, its too good. If used in the right away is even superior to numbered swiss accounts The only current drawback is that 1-3 days wait period if you choose a low fee to fund your lightning wallet (if you dont, in 10 minutes you are funded). And $10 is still resonable compared to wire fees. After funding, its as good or better to just about any payment method there is out there!
I believe most detractors, including myself, do not doubt it can be used as a way to pay for things in the future. The current problem is the volatility of the value of the coin itself. You buy $500 worth of something with BTC, and by the time you get back to your car with your $500 worth of goods, you could have saved $100 by waiting a few mins...Or spent $100 more by waiting a few mins longer than that. The USD prices do not change that quickly. They take weeks or months to move incrementally up or down (usually up, by fractions of a dollar).
When one bit coin is worth $1 million. The price will stabilise as total market cap will be $22 trillion. Then even one big fund buying $10 billion worth of coin wont move the price by as much as it would today.
A potential idea for prank : Paying with Bitcoin, for carrots in Moscow market. Paying with Bitcoin, for oil change in Detroit. Paying with Bitcoin, for Nike sneakers in downtown Shanghai. For the record, nothing similar on YT. Edit : Sorry, there is : It works well, if one is a criminal, but for average citizen, nah.
That would be funnier if Walmart actually did accept BTC as payment, and the CS reps just didn't know.
That's because you live in a medieval country. In Europe most countries do wire transfers FOR FREE in Euro's. No need to open accounts, put money, wait three days, pay a fee again... And I always know if can afford what I want to buy, as the currency is stable. If I would have ordered a 40K present on last friday and would have paid it on monday the price in bitcoin would probably be up 25% as bitcoin went from over 40K to almost 30K.
"Those purchases at bitrefill are not recorded at the blockchain, the lightning network has a onion routing style system to prevent lightning channels to know where the money came from andwhere it is going" Amazing system to buy online, specially if you have to return the item. Good luck getting your money back.
You said it. Bitcoin was used to traffic drugs and what happened is they arrested people involved, forced them to surrender their Bitcoin to the Federal Government. What do you do when you are threatened with numerous charges and forced to give up your username and password? Game over.