The Bitcoin Company

That's what Bitcoin is all about, being spent peer-to-peer without having to ask anyone's permission. Today, very few merchants accept Bitcoin in exchange for their goods and services (we are so early), making it difficult for those of us who need to spend our satoshis. The Bitcoin Company is here to help solve this problem, allowing you to spend your bitcoins to buy gift cards

On this subject, a brief aside to emphasize the importance, in my opinion, of using Bitcoin as a means of payment rather than solely as a store of value. Indeed, as these lines are being written, the reflex of too many Bitcoiners, when they have the opportunity to spend their precious Sats, is to refrain from doing so, and instead spend the euro / fiat shitcoin imposed on them.

On the face of it, this may seem perfectly reasonable, but it does make you wonder about the logic behind it. Bitcoin is designed to be used without permission. Isn't it obvious, then, that the more businesses that accept Bitcoin around you, the more choices you have as a sovereign Bitcoiner? In other words, the easier it is for you to spend your Sats without asking permission, the more valuable your own Bitcoins become. So in this sense, you need to encourage adoption, favoring businesses that accept Bitcoin to give them a competitive edge that will encourage others to follow their example.

So even in a logic of preserving the value of one's Bitcoin savings, participating in the adoption of Bitcoin to make it as easy as possible to spend it, is at least as important as "HODL".

If you have to go through a Exchange to be able to spend your Bitcoins, then they're potentially worth 0. If you can spend them anywhere, they're worth a lot more.

In short, "spend" & "replace" seem to be the way forward. Participate in the development of adoption, distribute satoshis in as many places as possible, then buy back spent Sats as soon as possible.

The Bitcoin Company is like its competitor Bitrefill: it's a way of exchanging bitcoins for retail gift cards. You can practically live on a "standard Bitcoin" thanks to this type of solution, by creating a simple account.

The message couldn't be clearer: "Spend your Bitcoins Everywhere".

You'll find a wide selection of retailers, depending on the country you want to shop in.

The Bitcoin Company offers a wide range of products, from retail and fast food to streaming platforms, online games, e-commerce sites and phone top-ups.

Below is a selection of signs for the USA as an example:

To do so, visit their website.

On the home page, you'll be asked either to download the mobile application by scanning a QR code, or to use the web application by choosing "Browse our web app". For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be choosing the latter, because unlike the mobile application, which requires you to create an account using an e-mail address and password, the web version offers more options, as we'll see below.

Click on "Browse our web app".

So here we are, on the home page of the gift card purchasing platform.

Start by selecting the shopping area of interest in the top right-hand corner.

Once you have selected the zone, click on "Login".

You then have several options for logging in. Either the classic email/password combo, or solutions that are far more practical in my opinion, such as identification via your Lightning wallet.

If you're old school and want to find out how to easily create a secure mailbox and manage your passwords, I recommend you check out these 2 other tutorials:

For our part, let's opt for "Sign in with Lightning".

On the next page, you'll see a QR code that you'll need to scan with your favorite Wallet Lightning.

Your Wallet Lightning thus becomes your unique means of identification for all sites supporting this protocol, called LNURL-AUTH (for authentication).

You don't need an e-mail address or password for each site - your Wallet identifies you, and the icing on the cake is that a new identity is generated for each site visited. Practical from a privacy point of view.

So let's open our Wallet Phoenix, and scan the QR code shown. Once scanned, click on "Sign-in", then "OK".

Instantly, you're identified via your Wallet Lightning, which can be Phoenix or another of course, as most wallets on the market support this feature.

As long as you retain access to your Wallet and don't lose your seed phrase (or, more generally, access to your account in the case of custodial wallets for which you don't hold the private keys), you'll be able to regain access to your accounts.

By clicking on the little "Honey Badger" in the top right-hand corner of the screen, you can view your account details.

You can now see your Username, which is a random number and will be different for every site you visit that supports this authentication mode. At the bottom of the screen you can see that the authentication method is indeed specified as LNURL Auth.

Finally, let's return to the home page by clicking on "Gift Cards" in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

Start by selecting the product category you're interested in. In our case, as we're about to go on vacation and need to book hotels, we'll select "Travel".

Then "Hotel.com".

You're now on the presentation page for your chosen gift card. Don't hesitate to take a look at the details that may be important when using the card on the merchant's site. Enter the amount you wish to assign to the gift card. In this example, we'll choose 10 USD, but you can go as high as 500 USD for this gift card. Minimum and maximum gift card amounts vary from store to store.

The potential cashback reward in Bitcoin is shown above the description (here 4%).

By ticking the "Apply Reward Balance" button, you can choose to use cashback from a previous purchase to finance this one.

Finally, the "Send as Gift" button lets you send the gift card to a lucky recipient by e-mail, which is what we're going to do.

Finally, click on "generate Invoice".

Pay for the Invoice then display either On-Chain or Lightning.

Once the Invoice has been paid for, you'll be told that the gift card has just been e-mailed to the recipient selected in the previous step. Let's check how it's going.

We have indeed received our email containing the gift card. By copying the link provided and opening it in a browser, we'll be redirected to a web page that will allow us to retrieve the details needed to spend the card on the merchant's site.

Click on "Reveal card details" to obtain the codes needed to use the card when paying on the merchant site.

If you do not wish to send the gift card by e-mail, after you have paid for the Invoice, simply click on "View Card" to access the web page as above.

Finally, you can view all the gift cards purchased via this account at any time via the "My Cards" tab at the top of the screen. Once a card has been used, don't forget to archive it for future reference. This will enable you to navigate more clearly between your cards that are still valid, and those that are already empty.

Finally, if you wish to use on mobile the LNURL Auth authentication method we've seen in this tutorial, you'll need to access The Bitcoin Company website via your mobile browser, then add a shortcut to your home screen. The official application only allows authentication by email/password.

And there you have it, you now know how to spend your bitcoins without KYC at major retailers for your everyday spending. It's not a particularly satisfactory method, and it's still "do-it-yourself". But until more people realize that it's in their interest to accept electronic cash in their businesses, it's still very useful...

If you'd like to help popularize Bitcoin and encourage an independent merchant to adopt this payment method, I recommend you take a look at our comprehensive tutorial on Swiss Bitcoin Pay. It's an all-in-one solution for BTC payment processors, easy to install and manage on a day-to-day basis: