Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are often heavily criticized for their low real-world use, but as the Money2020 Payments Race shows every year, it's slowly getting easier to use bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to buy things and get places.
The Money2020 Payments Race sees four payments teams (Cash, Card, Crypto, Wearables) race around the world, stopping off at checkpoints along the way—and this year Team Crypto was the first to cross the finish line, though Team Mobile won on points.
While bitcoin and cryptocurrency use in the real world is still far from common, it's becoming easier to buy things and get around using crypto.
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The bitcoin and cryptocurrency candidate this year was reality TV star of controversial U.K. show The Circle, Alex Hobern, who made the 12-day trip around the world using bitcoin and cryptocurrencies exclusively to buy tickets and stay alive, traveling from the U.K. through Ireland, Canada, the U.S., Hong Kong, the Middle East, and eastern Europe before arriving at the finish line in Amsterdam.
Hobern, who had no prior experience of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, had to learn about them as he went, meeting people involved in bitcoin, Ripple's XRP, litecoin and ethereum in the course of his travels and relying on websites like CoinMap to find cryptocurrency-accepting stores.
"In general, the easiest parts were the hotels and flights. There were middle-men who were able to accept bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in exchange for booking these things," said Hobern, saying there were stores that said they did accept bitcoin and crypto for a short time but have since stopped.
"There were a lot of stores and merchants who said online or in their window that they accept bitcoin or cryptocurrencies but we were unable to use it when we arrived. One in Ireland had a bitcoin sign in the window but the person behind the counter didn't know what bitcoin was."
Alex Hobern, a U.K. reality TV star, traveled around the world using only bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
Twitter / @alexhobern
One of the ways Hobern managed to buy things and get around was a service called Bitrefill, which allows people to buy vouchers with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
"It's almost a loophole in the rules, that you can use these kinds of services to pay for goods and services like Starbucks or Uber through a third party," said Hobern. "I also paid people in bitcoin and crypto using Wirex, who would then buy what I needed for me."
Wirex is a contactless Visa card that lets users top up their account with bitcoin and or other major cryptocurrencies then spend it with merchants who accept British pounds, U.S. dollars, or euros.
"I've certainly got the bitcoin and cryptocurrency bug. I'd do the race again but I'm not sure if I'd want to be Team Crypto," Hobern added.
The Money2020 Payments Race comes after some of the world's biggest retailers began accepting bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin cash via an app called Spedn, built by U.S.-based payments startup Flexa, with the Amazon-owned supermarket chain Whole Foods, department store Nordstrom, and coffee chain Starbucks among the biggest chains involved.
Flexa expects to have 100 different merchants accepting cryptocurrency payments through the app by the end of the year, totaling more than 30,000 stores.
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