This year, bitcoin went from being a niche hobby to a money-making phenomenon. We can’t tell you exactly how much it’s worth when you are reading this (due to its constant fluctuation), but it’s probably enough to have gotten you curious at some point.
One of the biggest hurdles with any alt-currency is knowing what exactly you can do with it. However, the more established bitcoin becomes, the more retailers and businesses will be willing to accept it as a legitimate currency. Here are five things you probably didn’t realize you could buy with your bitcoins.
Gift cards
Not only can gift cards be used as actual presents, they also greatly expand where you can spend your stock of bitcoin. At sites like Gyft and eGifter, you can purchase gift cards for all sorts of retailers that don’t formally take bitcoin yet.
Perhaps most significantly, you can purchase Amazon gift cards and, from there, buy literally anything.
Pizza
We knew bitcoin was for real when we first found out you could buy pizza. PizzaForCoins has been around for a while, allowing you to place orders for various pizza chains through their website and paying with your bitcoin.
Like many of these methods of spending bitcoins, this is a workaround to pizza chains actually accepting cryptocurrencies, but hey — it works.
Airline/hotel/space flight tickets
Travel companies have been ahead of the game on bitcoin for a while now. Surprisingly, big companies like Expedia and CheapAir now accept bitcoin directly through their websites for hotel reservations and airline tickets.
You can even go to space with bitcoin through Virgin Galactic.
Computers
In 2014, Dell announced that it would be accepting bitcoin through its online retail store, making it the biggest company at the time to do so.
But you don’t have to limit yourself to Dell if you want to buy a computer with bitcoin. You can also head over to Newegg and buy pretty much any computer or computer component you could ever need.
Pretty much anything
We mentioned above that gift cards are a good way of opening up the purchasing power of your bitcoins, but this one takes it one step further.
The Amazon-competitor, Overstock, has become the first major online retailer to accept bitcoin for purchases. The CEO of the company is so all-in with cryptocurrencies that just this week he launched a $250 million Initial Coin Offering through the company’s exchange, tZero.
