this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Directly, not many places. Through gift cards. Absolute fucktons of places. I have been purchasing my groceries with Monero for over a year now, every single month, and bought some home insulation with Monero, and bought Thanksgiving dinner from a restaurant with Monero as well.
Edit: i also pay my phone bill with Monero
Edit 2: Truly, the only thing I have not figured out how to pay with Monero is direct debits, such as car payments, mortgage payments, etc. that require a bank and routing number. Anything payable with a credit or debit card is fair game.
The whole gift card secondary market is sketchy as fuck though. I've dipped my foot in a bit and it seems like most of the inventory is the result of scammers converting their gains into usable currency.
Not all of it for sure. Sometimes people just want to unload gift cards they'll never use. But that seems like the exception rather than the rule.
Like, why is this dude from Nigeria selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of US-locked gift cards?
Also, all these large companies and regulatory bodies are completely aware of this shit. I don't know why it's tolerated.
The gift cards I purchase are from companies who specialize in the sale of cards such as coincards, coinsbee, and cake pay. These are all registered businesses, so there's less likelihood of crazy crap like you mentioned.
Being a "registered business" doesn't mean anything. Especially when they're in loose jurisdictions with little to no laws or enforcement. And it sure doesn't mean they aren't sketchy and the origin of the cards isn't ethically dubious or even illegal.
You don't ever wonder how they pay like 50% (or less) on the card's face value and resell them at 70-80% for a profit?
I worked a bit on a competitor service and the brokers are all not people I ever want to interact with again. We tried to pierce the veil a little bit and the least sketchy source examples we got were like mechanical turk workers getting paid in gift cards (wage theft basically), and immigrants trying to send money back home to their family from the US (something crypto was supposed to help with).
Coinsbee is german, coincards is canadian, and cake pay is US. Those don't seem like very loose jurisdictions, and they don't sell cards at a discount unless the retailer gives them a discount on the cards to begin with, and then they pass them on.
Cake Pay is registered in St Kitts, for instance. But it doesn't matter. Playing the ignorant middle man can get you legal for the most part.
And I guarantee you that their source of cards is not directly from the retailer.
But whatever. If you don't want to believe me and just want to run with binders on for that sweet 30% off your Amazon purchase, that's your business.
None of those services offer discounts. So either they are getting the cards from reputable sources or they are making a nice markup by getting them from shady places