What can you buy with Bitcoin

Over the past decade, Bitcoin has grown as a store of value and undergone upgrades to improve its transaction processing capabilities. Various businesses now accept Bitcoin (BTC) as a payment method, both in-person and online.

Despite having higher fees than many other cryptocurrencies, BTC can be helpful for larger transactions — especially considering its impressive security. For a large part of its existence, the Bitcoin community placed a lot of faith in the cryptocurrency becoming a viable alternative to many centralized payment systems existing in the market. However, BTC is currently primarily used as a long-term investment, an asset much like gold or stocks.

The main problem is the number of transactions that the network can process: Bitcoin’s absolute maximum capacity is a mere seven transactions per second.
Most major online retailers still do not accept BTC as a form of payment, but there is a way of buying products from them using digital currency: You can shop with Bitcoin by using gift cards.

Indeed, significant portions of Bitcoin-related transactions are gift card purchases. Gift cards are the simplest way of using the cryptocurrency to buy products from global companies and small local businesses, online and offline.