How to create a local alternative to Bitrefill? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

How to create a local alternative to Bitrefill?

2818 sats \ 22 comments \ @Monotone 23 Oct 2023 bitcoin

Hi everyone, opportunities offered by Bitrefill are now very relevant for Russia and Belarus, but the service has removed all ways to pay for something with bitcoin for these countries.. Until 2022, various gift cards and phone number top-ups were available for Russia and Belarus on this site, making it easier to use Bitcoin where there is no way to use it directly (yet).

I realize that there are sanctions and all that, but to delist these countries and make life more difficult for Bitcoiners who would like to spend their sats, but to do so is now much more difficult.

In this regard, I have a question for the community. How can we create an alternative for citizens of these countries so that we can use bitcoin in our daily lives and use fiat as little as possible? I have never done anything like this and I don't know where to start, any help would be very valuable.

I would really like to make maybe a separate site with offers to recharge phone numbers, buy gift cards exclusively for citizens of Russia and Belarus so that we don't have to rely on Bitrefill anymore.

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237 sats \ 4 replies \ @nullcount 23 Oct 2023

Can you access Bitrefill via Tor or VPN so they cannot tell you are in a sanctioned region?

Have you tried CoinCards.com?

If you want to start a local alternative, you need to find a way to acquire gift cards, phone credits, etc. at a discount. This will allow you to be sustainable as you can sell them at face value for a small profit.

Usually brands will offer discounts on their credit when you reach significant volume. Until then, use a gift card issuing API offered by a third party. Then you are simply a Bitcoin translation layer to that API.

Maybe you can find a card issuer in your country. These card APIs are used by corporations to automate gift card delivery for employee birthdays, etc.

You will likely need to sell your first 1000 cards at a loss (or break even). It may be possible to charge a premium if you have a local monopoly at the start.

Build a WooCommerce site with Wordpress. Connect the site to your Bitcoin/Lightning node using the BTCPay plugin. Find an API for issuing and sending digital gift cards at wholesale and integrate their API into your site.

Your site would simply handle the conversion of sats to Fiat so you can pay the Card API provider. Make sure you have enough profit to cover any exchange fees from selling sats.

1 sat \ 3 replies \ @Monotone OP 23 Oct 2023

Bitrefill is available in my area without a VPN, it's just that the service itself has removed gift cards and phone top-ups from its website.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I'll try to explore the available options)

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @nullcount 23 Oct 2023

Bitrefill may be hiding those products for users with a sanctioned IP address. I have verified that gift cards and phone top ups are still available using a USA IP address.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 23 Oct 2023

Some cards are bound to a particular region. For example, Amazon US vs Amazon EU. Maybe bitrefill has stopped offering cards in your region.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Monotone OP 23 Oct 2023

If you go to the direct link to top up a phone, for example, bitrefill will just show that the cards have run out of cards link

232 sats \ 1 reply \ @w0nderl4nd 23 Oct 2023

I am not sure if something like that would be even legal in your country, but maybe there is an option to test this out. Far from being the most efficient/scalable way to run this, but you could start small and do it manually for a few users, just to see if it gets traction. Later on, if you see that there is a market for such service, you can ask around to build a proper automated webapp with API integrations etc.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Monotone OP 23 Oct 2023

By law in these countries, you cannot use "digital assets" for payment. But no one prevents you from moving the jurisdiction from these countries to a more friendly one for opening this kind of business.

I would be happy to test this, but I don't know how to approach this issue correctly, because I have no experience in this area.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @gringo 24 Oct 2023

I’m currently trying to figure this out myself… learning as I go.

In general my plan is:

Find gift cards people want
Find ways to acquire them cheaply
Find ways to acquire fiat with BTC cheaply

There are several challenges:

Many gift cards people want are from big companies; gas stations, supermarket chains, telcos. They don’t want to bother with a startup, it’s too low ROI for them to invest effort in integration
Many bulk gift card providers explicitly ban reselling cards to third parties, only buying for your employees or gifting to customers

My solutions are:

Manually purchase gift cards via the e.g. phone topup websites
Program screen scraping tools to enter my credit card details into the aforementioned websites
Going after small businesses and webshops as early-stage partners
Selling BTC to buyers willing to pay a premium for noKYC sats

None of this is scalable long term but hopefully I’ll get off the ground.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Monotone OP 24 Oct 2023

Thank you for your detailed response

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 23 Oct 2023

It will need to be p2p exchanges. Try hodlhodl, robosats, peach or bisq

5 sats \ 1 reply \ @lightwalker 23 Oct 2023

As it is in the question: "local alternative", I completely agree with Stackers here. Creating a local Bitcoin circular economy and maintaining P2P exchanges can help. Very hard for third party interference.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Monotone OP 23 Oct 2023

I'll think about it. Maybe that's what's needed

5 sats \ 3 replies \ @om 23 Oct 2023

You can register at any p2p platform as a vendor and select "gift cards" as the payment method.

Of course that assumes that your volume is sufficiently low that you can just buy the cards at a local shop. You can't reach Bitrefill's volume without consent of the gift card issuers, but they won't agree to service you since it's illegal.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Monotone OP 23 Oct 2023

I understand that, thank you. This is not about competition or the scale of Bitrefill. No.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @mo 23 Oct 2023

Ah, found my opposite!

PS: it will be helpful if you could share links or reference of the P2P platforms you have mentioned...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 23 Oct 2023

aaaaah, the opposite! :) Random comments is not the place you should source your list of exchanges from. That said I'd pick whatever Lopp has and Robosats although it's difficult to build reputation on the latter.

184 sats \ 2 replies \ @VEINTIUNO 23 Oct 2023

Not sure if there's any alternative. However, the best way is always to rely on your local peers. Bitrefil is still a third party offering a service... I leave it there for you, to understand why you are in trouble now.

GO PEER2PEER, find your local bitcoiners, real people, create services between you all and grow the community so more services are available to all of you.

The first service, exchange bitcoin for cash and buy whatever you want with that in your local currency. Need to top up a phone number? Do it with the cash you just got or ask someone to do it for you in exchange for sats.

Be creative, stop relying on third parties... Use them when needed, but do NOT assume they're going to be there for you forever.

15 sats \ 1 reply \ @AmadeusK525_old 23 Oct 2023

Unfortunately, this is the hardest and the only "real" solution. We'll only go forward when we start actually developing the local community to integrate everyone on a BTC ecosystem (like some projects around the world - Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Beach Brazil...). And it's easier said than done. For the OP: I'm sure you can find some online communities on stuff like Discord with people from Russia that have the same mission. You don't have to dedicate your life to it, but getting in touch with these people, talking to merchants locally when you visit their stores and introducing them to BTC is the way to go, Bitrefill is really just covering up a hole with duct tape

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @supratic 23 Oct 2023

You don't have to dedicate your life to it

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @jgbtc 23 Oct 2023

It's so stupid. How does buying gift cards with bitcoin help Putin? This is purely punitive against normal Russian people.