I bought Weed with US Dollar Coin and got 4% back in XLM
Life is getting kind of crazy. I used to break two laws when I was a young boy. I smoked weed and I placed sports bets with a bookie. Fast forward 20 years later and all that shit is LEGAL!! So the other day I went to the legal weed store to buy some cartridges. The total was about $200.00. I showed them my medical card which allows me to save tax.
And then I gave the check out person my Coinbase Debit card. We tried it once and it asked checking or savings. I chose checking and the card didn't go through. The guy at the register liked the idea of paying for weed with cyrpto so we gave it another try and I selected savings account this time. It worked.
I spent $215 worth of US Dollar Coin on weeds using my Coinbase debit card. The best part is that I get a 4% rebate which I get back in Stellar Lumens. Even if Stellar Lumens don't appreciate it is still pretty cool. I Lumens do go up one day it could make transactions like this profitable.
I coined a new phrase which is purchase mining. Purchase mining is when you use a debit card with a crypto cash back to purchase. For every dollar you spend you mine 4% XLM.
There is trading where you mine the trading fees so I think this is reasonable to say that you mine the purchase and get 4% back.
So far I have spent about $500 on the card between weed and fast food. I have earned about $20 in Stellar Lumens which are about 20 cents each right now.
Now I have looked into the crypto.com rewards card and it looks pretty different. You get your rewards in CRO which is fine with me, but in order to get the high interest you need to state CRO tokens. That is a significant amount of money they require you to tie up so that they can give you a high cash back. The beauty of Coinbase is that I can move money around in seconds and have it ready for debit.
I keep my couple hundred bucks in DAI which earns 2% interest and when I need to take it out, I convert it to USDC because USDC is what I have tied to my debit.
Another totally cool thing is that you can attach your Coinbase card to Apple Pay and to Paypal. That will allow you to get the extra protections that Coinbase probably won't provide. If you get robbed you will probably need to rely on the policies of Visa.
Here is an update. You only get the 4 percent when you use the card to pay for good in a standard debit transaction. If you take money out of an ATM or if the store makes you put in your pin code, you will not get the 4%. Therefor, I did not get 4 percent back for buying weed. I did get it for Starbucks and Chick Fil A.
What is Stellar?
The Stellar platform is primarily a tool for making normal currency transfers, but it also has its own cryptocurrency, Lumens. Stellar has value in its own right, but unlike Bitcoin, it is not designed to be used as a means of payment. Rather, it is designed to be an intermediary of last resort for currency conversion.
Just like Ripple, it is a non-minable cryptocurrency, 100 billion tokens were created. The Stellar Foundation has the mission to distribute 95% of the tokens, among random individuals, Bitcoin or Ripple holders. The 5% of the tokens are reserved to maintain its operating costs.
Behind this platform is Jed McCaleb, you will remember him for being the programmer of Ripple in 2011, he left the company in 2013 and focused on creating Mt.Gox, the first Bitcoin echange that sold and ceased operations in 2014, causing an unprecedented market crash. This financial platform considerably lowers the transaction costs between cryptocurrencies, it also allows you to buy Bitcoin with dollars saving the high commissions of the best known exchanges and also gets it in a quite acceptable time.