After 5+ years, I just made my FIRST real purchase WITH BitCoin Here's how it went...
I've been involved in buying, selling, trading, developing for, giving presentations on, writing articles for, and managing user groups for BitCoin on multiple platforms since June 2014.
But, it wasn't until today, November 2, 2019 that I actually USED BitCoin for its intended purpose... to BUY SOMETHING with it, mere moments ago. Here's what I bought, and here's how it went:
Reading for a while now that Overstock.com accepts BitCoin directly as payments, and since I've been wanting to remove myself from depending so much on Amazon, I decided to order our new kitchen curtains on OverStock and pay for them with BitCoin.
While writing this blog article, I got a confirmation text message that the BTC transaction went through.
Here's how the whole process went:
First, I did what anyone else would do. I searched Overstock.com for kitchen curtains, narrowed it down to 7 that I liked, sent the links to my wife, who picked the set she liked, then I added that to my cart and clicked "check out". There were several payment options and BitCoin was one of them. I chose that. It showed me what fraction of a BitCoin this would be. I logged into CoinBase.com and checked the current price of BitCoin and calculated that the conversion was 3 cents cheaper using BitCoin to pay.
Now, this is important: I do NOT keep large balances of BitCoin on my CoinBase central bank account. That exists ONLY as an on and off ramp (to buy and sell BitCoin for fiat). When I buy BitCoin, I move it to my personal wallet on the blockchain, managed by the Electrum Windows desktop app. So that means I have to use that app to send my payments.
So, on the OverStock website, I clicked to accept the payment details. They displayed a BitCoin address (along with the amount of bitcoins to send). I opened my Electrum wallet app on my desktop, which requires a wallet filename (which it already had filled in from last time I used it... BTW, NEVER use the default file name offered for security reasons!!!!) and a password for my wallet. I use LastPass to manage my passwords and generate VERY LONG passwords for everything, especially for my cryptocurrency wallets. So in my browser, I popped open the LastPass menu and searched for my wallet password and clicked "edit". Because this is so sensitive, I have that account in LastPass set up to require re-entry of my lastpass password (which is also very long), which I was prompted for and entered. Then I had to click the "show password" button, where I could then copy and paste it out of LP and into my Electrum wallet app. From there, I clicked the "Send" tab, then copied and pasted the number of bitcoins to send, pasted that into the wallet app, then copied and pasted the BitCoin address that OverStock.com showed me from their site into my wallet, chose the amount of satoshis I want to pay per byte in the transaction (the more, the faster the network will process it), reviewed for accuracy, then hit send, which prompted me for my wallet password again.
The final step was to click a checkbox on the OverStock.com website, telling it that I have sent the payment. They notified me that they'll e-mail me when they see the payment has gone through.
About 5 minutes later, I got the text message (shown above) that it had gone through. Looking on blockstream.info, I see that it now has 1 confirmation. (For the record, we normally don't consider a transaction complete until there are 6 confirmations).
Checking my e-mail, I see that 3 minutes ago, I got a confirmation from CoinPayments.net (I presume this is who OverStock.com has partnered with to handle BitCoin payments) that my funds have been received.
Now I wait for my curtains to be delivered.
In short, here are the steps:
1. Found the item I wanted on overstock.com and put it in my cart and went to checkout.
2. From checkout, I entered my shipping address and chose BitCoin as my payment option.
3. I logged into CoinBase.com to see the current price of BitCoin and calculated what OverStock was asking for in BitCoin to dollars, to ensure I wasn't going to be overpaying (I wasn't... I was underpaying by 3 cents).
4. I launched my BitCoin Electrum wallet app.
5. Got my password out of LastPass and pasted into the wallet app.
6. Clicked the Send tab.
7. Copied the amount of BitCoins from the overstock checkout page and pasted into my wallet app, then did the same for the overstock send-to BitCoin address.
8. Confirmed all was good, then clicked Send in the wallet app.
9. Back on the overstock checkout page, I clicked a checkbox to let it know that I've completed the send operation on my end.
A few minutes later, I received a text message from OverStock that they received my order. A few minutes after that, I got a confirmation that my BitCoin transaction had gone through (from CoinPayments.net).
My Thoughts:
This was roughly about the same complexity that I normally go through in an online purchase. But, I use virtual credit card numbers, which take a little more effort than just entering the number off a physical card. Compared to an average user's experience, this was a bit more involved and required technical knowledge on:
1. Password management software and techniques.
2. Having already installed a BitCoin wallet app.
3. Technical knowledge of how to use the app.
4. Technical knowledge of how to use BitCoin.
5. Technical knowledge of how to validate prices and purchases.
Conclusion:
For an average user, unless they're personally trained by someone like me, with technical knowledge, this is never going to take off. We need much better user experiences. All of these different apps and websites that I had to pull up should all be built into a single browser extension. Online stores that offer BitCoin should have a training video showing from start to finish, how to make a BitCoin transaction, using whatever software they recommend, with links to install the software.
Having said that, there ARE some browser based wallets that I will be trying out on my next OverStock purchase. Perhaps some of this can be simplified.