With the recent supreme court decision to lift the ban on crypto-currencies, combined with rising interest from the crypto community in India, I will show you how Bitrefill allows you to use crypto-currencies in your everyday life, in India.

Recently, I tried to spend a day living off Bitcoin in honor of Kashmir Hill’s Living on Bitcoin experiment.

Let me share my first hand account of how I’m actually able to use Bitrefill to purchase gift cards/digital vouchers for pretty much any product or service you can think of in India.

What this means is that even without exchanges allowing fiat conversion or banking services, I was able to literally live on crypto-currency. A quick intro on Bitrefill:

Bitrefill offers over 200 gift cards, which cover a huge variety of services from all the largest retailers and top brands. Everything from eating out, shopping at the mall, buying groceries, cabs,online services like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm to mobile recharges.

Bitrefill accepts payment in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, and Dogecoin. You can even pay with Lightning and get a discount of 2%. Depending on how you pay, your vouchers will be confirmed instantly (a few minutes in rare cases, you know how Block chain confirmations go).

As you can probably see by now, there’s a lot of flexibility, with both what I can buy, and how I want to pay. For the day of my living on Bitcoin experiment, I’ll run through what I did, and how I was able to accomplish it.

The experiment: Living on BTC in India for a whole day

To start my Sunday, I was able to order breakfast on Swiggy using a gift card I bought on Bitrefill. On the side I also got an Amazon gift card to keep my Amazon Pay wallet loaded, there’s usually cashback offers on wallet payments. After a hearty breakfast and a guilt trip on “It’s high time to start cooking”, I finally placed an order for some groceries on BigBasket and headed out to meet up with a friend. We had movie plans followed by a late lunch.

I was easily able to get an Uber with an Uber voucher, and head down to the movie theater, and on the way I bought two tickets for the film with a Bookmyshow voucher. The catalog on Bitrefill never ceases to amaze me.

By the time I reached, my friend was already waiting for me (well, you can’t really expect everyone to turn up on time). We saw the movie and decided to check out the shops on the lower level. Bitrefill even has vouchers to Shoppers Stop & Lifestyle.

What better than Pizza after a movie? I bought a voucher for Pizza Hut and placed an order. My friend was clearly more excited than me about this experiment, he hadn’t paid for anything! His lucky day I guess.

For the evening, we decided to grab a couple of drinks, so I checked my phone for a voucher that could pay my bar tab. I saw a voucher for The Beer Cafe and purchased the voucher to get a couple rounds with my friend.

The Beer Cafe turned out to be a pretty decent place with a nice ambiance, and to quote my friend “Beer tastes so much better when you know it’s free”. We stuck around for a couple of hours before calling it a day.

I quickly bought another voucher and caught an Uber back to my place. Reflecting on the day, I decided that the experiment was a huge success! It was much easier living on crypto than I had expected.

It worked for a day, but what about living on crypto for the long-term?

After my experiment, it really made the gears start turning in my head. Could I do this long term? Is it really possible to actually live on crypto for an extended period of time?

I decided to find out, and my first stop was to see what I could really do with digital vouchers and gift cards. I decided to really comb through which offers were available in India, on Bitrefill.

The three most important things for me to be able to do this long term are rent, utilities, and food. I needed to keep the roof over my head, keep the lights turned on, and buy groceries and stuff, as needed.

Rent

While there isn’t actually a rent voucher (yet!) I am able to use Paytm vouchers to pay for a lot of things including my rent. Many landlords accept Paytm, and I can use this for general payments too.

Utilities

For electricity, DTH, and internet bills, I can easily pay them with Paytm, Amazon, and Flipkart vouchers, so I have a couple of options for this one. I can even pay for things like mobile recharges, landline bills, cooking gas, etc.

Groceries

For buying groceries, This was actually a breeze, and that I had lots of options to buy any food item I needed. For starters, I could buy groceries online with Big Basket, or I could run down to Spar and buy at the location.

I could also order groceries on Amazon and Flipkart, and get them delivered to my house which was amazingly convenient. Besides groceries, Amazon and Flipkart have pretty much any other product under the sun.

Shopping

For clothing, I can buy any of the latest fashions with Lifestyle, Westside, Fastrack, Pantaloons and Shopper’s Stop. Bitrefill has vouchers for pretty much every major brand.

Online Shopping

As I mentioned above, Amazon and Flipkart are amazing, but I can also order from Croma and Big Bazaar as well. If you can’t find what you need with these four, you’ll probably have to find it on the dark web, because it might be illegal.

Dining & Take out

With Zomato I can choose from over 5300 different dining options, if I want delivery, I can use UberEats to order from thousands of options. I can even get a sundae from Baskin Robbins. And of course, there’s Swiggy too.

Entertainment

If I want to spend a night out on the town, I have a lot of options to book tickets to shows, movies, sports, and other events with Bookmyshow. I can also use Google Play India, or get IMAX & 4DX movie tickets with PVR cinemas.

Travel

For Traveling I can book my accommodations with AirBnB, OYO, and Hotels.com. To book flights to get there, I can use MakemyTrip, Cleartrip, or Flightgift.

All of these examples are just scratching the surface of what you can really do with Bitrefill in India. They have hundreds of additional options available that I didn’t cover here.

If you want to take a plunge down the rabbit hole, check out the entire catalog of Gift Cards available to crypto users in India.

Have another product you think would help a lot of people? Send your suggestion via email to hello@bitrefill.com, or tell us on telegram!