Ask HN: What cryptocurrency-loaded debit card do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What cryptocurrency-loaded debit card do you use?

9 pointsdmos6214 comments

I'd like to use one. Providers I'm aware of: AdvCash, Shakepay, Cryptopay.me.

Bad idea, I've got plenty of crypto, but I wouldn't pay a percentage of it for a company to get me liquidity to use it as a card.

Just sell some and get a normal card. It's a bad money-wise decision for now.

When they start to settle transactions for the same pricing they do for normal CCs, with the same monthly fee, it's worth it, otherwise, bad idea.

This is like travelling to a country and using your CC everywhere, when you could get a better currency exchange rate by not using it and just getting some fiat. If you gonna take those kind of decisions, why invest in crypto at all?

I know that some people gonna hate this, perhaps because they do got cards or they are the companies which make money doing that.

In some countries, your solution is more expensive than the BTC CC fee.

then good, but most of the countries, not rly

Second the bad idea. I've been dabbling in electronic currency systems since the days of E-Gold and I've never seen a debit card last more than a couple of years before Visa/MC decided to seize the cards and all the values on them for violating their TOS or money laundering concerns. They also are highway robbery in terms of inflated fees for whoever is operating the scheme because of the risk involved. Because I live in a semi large city I've always just found somebody local willing to convert to cash through localbitcoins or bitcoin-otc or who can pay in a local bank transfer method that doesn't involve correspondent bank wire transfer fees.

The few times I've needed to receive an international wire for contract work I've done or exchanging coins I used a middle man currency exchange service (VBCE.ca) that received the wire for me and paid via a local method.

I use the Bitpay VISA card and it's worked flawlessly for me for the past year. Sometimes it takes a bit for enough confirmations to pile on for Bitpay to release funds...but 98% of the time it happens within seconds.

$10 in BTC to order the card. $2 ATM fee in the US (I never use an ATM for this thing...mostly online purchases and the occasional "forgot-my-other-card" purchase). Conversion rate is reasonable.

I tried using Shakepay but did not have a good on-boarding experience.

The one thing I don't like about Bitpay is that their mobile app is total garbage - I only use the web interface.

They seem to be the veteran in this space, but their docs seem largely US oriented. For European clientele, it's mentioned that an EU issuer is partnered, but not if EUR cards are supported, or what the exchange rates are.

It seems to me like an expensive way to pay. Correct me if I am wrong but these debit cards have higher fees compared to using a fiat based Mastercard or Visa right?

Because for every transaction you have extra crypto <-> fiat conversion which must have some fee attached to it by vendor who does the conversion.

Normal fees are 1% loading fee and 1$ monthly maintenance fee.

In some situations, for example as a substitute to paypal, this is less expensive. Paypal charges 4% for withdrawing funds. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Paypal is probably more expensive. But why would you use Paypal instead of normal debit/credit card? Not sure what is advantage of Paypal these days.

I agree that Paypal isn't that interesting. As for crypto cards, they have the advantage of an anonymous way (in the case of foregoing Know-Your-Customer processes) of spending potentially-anonymous currency (crypto currency).

which implementation of cryptocurrency is anonymous? My understanding of bitcoin is that it is basically a hash of all previous transactions.

The people who ripped off Mt. Gox went through great lengths to obfuscate their transactions but were unsuccessful.

I'm waiting on http://MetalPay.com

Their alpha should be coming out any day now with the beta scheduled by end of year (I think)

Update:

Alpha scheduled for end of October:

https://blog.metalpay.com/metal-dev-update-2/

Bitpay?

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