From cointelegraph by Marcel Deer
Key takeaways
- Paying bills with cryptocurrencies offers several benefits, including increased privacy, lower transaction fees and global accessibility.
- To get started, you’ll need to set up a digital wallet and fund it with crypto.
- Crypto bill payment services enable you to pay various bills, including credit card, mortgage, rent, car payment and student loan bills.
- You can use over 100 different digital currencies to pay your regular expenses.
Paying bills with cryptocurrency is growing in popularity as digital currencies continue to gain mainstream adoption. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin BTC$95,537 and Ether ETH$3,567.63 can be used as an alternative payment method for many regular expenses, such as credit card bills or car repayments.
You can now use a huge range of altcoins. That means you could pay your mortgage with Dogecoin DOGE$0.4043 or your student debts with Pepe PEPE$0.0000199.
Why use cryptocurrency for bill payments?
There are several reasons you might choose to pay your bills with cryptocurrency.
- Privacy: Cryptocurrency offers a higher level of anonymity than traditional payments. It can be a burden to use banks with increasing levels of identification and paperwork to open accounts in certain countries. Meanwhile, anybody can create a crypto wallet and receive and send funds. However, you will likely still have to go through Know Your Customer (KYC) checks when making payments in crypto.
- Lower fees: Credit cards and international wire transfers often incur excessive fees. Paying bills with crypto can dramatically reduce payment fees, especially shielding you from inter-currency transaction fees.
- Location: You only need a smartphone or a computer to make cryptocurrency payments. That allows you to easily make payments from anywhere in the world.
- Control of funds: Banks can often freeze bank accounts or block payments, often by mistake or without valid justification. This can have a frustrating knock-on effect when paying bills like car payments or mortgages. With a crypto wallet, you never have to worry about third-party interference of your funds. You always retain complete control.
A growing number of businesses and suppliers are responding to the demand from people to pay their bills using cryptocurrency. Organizations such as AT&T, Microsoft, Shopify, Tesla and Logis have all started accepting digital currency payments. In some cases, companies can even integrate crypto into their payroll.
Adding to this, specialist crypto bill payment platforms have integrated with payment processors. Payment processors are systems that handle financial transactions between the merchant and the customer. In certain countries, this enables you to pay almost any bill with cryptocurrency.