As is nearly every holiday season, I was the recipient of a few gift cards. Evidently, I am "impossible to shop for" so I end up with a few of these every year. I'm not ungrateful, nor complaining but I remember hearing about several sites where you can, in effect, swap your gift cards for crypto. I don't have the slightest clue what I will get with my eBay and Amazon gift cards. Not a clue; there's just really nothing I need or want at the moment. So, I decided to investigate. Just to find out what these websites are all about.

First I tried out Paxful, which is a peer-to-peer platform to buy and sell Bitcoin. They boast accepting over 350 different payment methods, including gift cards:

The first thing I noticed is that you aren't getting BTC for a 1:1 price. Instead, the best rates give you 62 cents for every dollar worth of a given gift card you want to swap. It's a hard pass for me; there's just no way I would take a hit like that, even if it the cards are gifts and I did not pay for them. 

Next up, I visited CoinCola:

Here is pretty much the same setup, a peer-to-peer marketplace with varying rates. The rates are even worse here, with the highest being 55 cents per dollar of gift card value. Again, I'm not particularly interested in losing the gift card for half of its value.

Finally, I checked out Crypto Voucher. This website seemed a bit less transparent, as it doesn't appear to be a peer-to-peer marketplace. Here's what the offer page looks like when first launched:

Let's see what the offer is:

While it is a bit better that the first two sites I visited, I'm still not interested. I realize it's quite difficult to get 1:1 value for gift cards, when trying to trade them for cash. For crypto, the rates are actually worse it appears. It was worth looking though, and I've come to the conclusion that these marketplaces may be beneficial if you're on the other end of the exchange and can put the gift cards to good use. If you're looking to swap your gift cards for crypto, however, you may just be better hanging onto them until you find something you want to buy for yourself. That's what I will be doing.

As for buying more Bitcoin, I'll stick to the regular exchanges where I can get fair market value -- BTC at $16,600 (at the time of this writing), as opposed to BTC @ $26,346 from one of these peer-to-peer marketplaces.

New year bringeth new gains!

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