The Gyft that keeps on Gyving

Gyft is a gift card service that not many people have heard of. Its business is issuing digital gift cards, but the main draw is that it will accept Bitcoins as payment for their gift cards. This has made Gyft a de-facto payment processor for Bitcoin-to-Fiat conversions, being the only way to spend Bitcoins at places like Amazon or Home Depot. You will see this commonly trotted out as a “killer app” for bitcoin, being able to move them to a 3rd party while Gyft farts out a digital gift card code to be used anywhere the merchant wants nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Today Gyft announced that they would now be selling iTunes gift cards! This got posted to /r/bitcoin on Reddit and hit the front page pretty quickly.

Unfortunately it’s one of the few things they will NOT be accepting Bitcoin for. Bitcoin sales account for more than 85% of their business so I’m not even sure why they bothered.

Enterprising Redditors have found a way to bypass this restriction and use Bitcoin on iTunes.

 

What about you buy their new Gyft Card and then change it to iTunes? There is always a work around.

See, you can buy iTunes with Bitcoin

https://www.gyft.com/buy-gift-cards/gyft-card/[1]

The Gyft Card allows for maximum flexibility. You can redeem the Gyft Card against any retailer on the Gyft platform, ranging from Amazon.com to Whole Foods Market. Instructions to redeem your Gyft Card:

  1. Copy your Gyft Card code.
  2. Select the gift card you would like to purchase and hit “Buy Now”.
  3. Paste your Gyft Card code into the Promo Code box and validate.
  4. Complete the payment process.

Which seems to work but I’m still not sure why you couldn’t just use a credit card? Or even just cash at your local Walgreens? It’s not like these are hard to find.

We found this very handy flowchart on how this whole process is supposed to work. You might want to bust out your dot matrix printer for this one, it’s kind of long.

gyft-itunes-flowchart

Either way I’m sure this will go well with Apple and not get the cards yanked like Walmart did earlier this year.