Paying your telephone bill using BTC!

Bitcoin (BTC) never stops surprising me; I’ve bought plane tickets and booked hotels using bitcoin. But, paying a telephone bill with crypto is another level of awesome!

being able to pay more goods and services with crypto, means the need to liquidate crypto to fiat cash will keep on decreasing. Hopefully, at some point there will be no need to liquidate because we can buying anything with crypto; it can be directly used as means of payment. In Chile, you are not taxed when you purchase crypto, but you will have to declare your earnings to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) once you sell.

If you can keep your crypto and not sell to profit or use to pay for your services, it helps out because you won't have to liquidate and pay taxes; at least in Chile.

Recently, DavinciJ15 gave a task out to our support team, to find out where you can pay a Chilean service using the lightning network.

Miguel, a Pandora's Wallet support team member, says it is not something you can easily find on the internet, but not impossible to find. He remembered that BUDA, one of our Chilean exchanges, works with lightning, and he decided to research there. To his surprise, BUDA had a list of recommendations to pay with lightning. You have to log in to your BUDA account, select lightning payment, and then go to the blog.

Once you are In the blog section, you will see some suggestions of sites that alow payments.

The one selected by Miguel was Bitrefill

You can pay your telephone bill without creating an account, very simple. The site is available for 150 countries. Once you select Chile, you can see all the country's major phone companies, and as simple as that, you can pay using BTC.

Miguel used his Blue Wallet to make the transaction. Blue wallet allows you to make transactions using the lightning network.

You don’t necessarily have to have a wallet that supports the lightning network; Bitrefill allows you to use any wallet. The sight does give you recommendations.

Although you can use any wallet, the benefits of paying using the lightning network would make me recommend it if you pay services and need fast confirmation.

Cryptocurrency and its blockchain system, I believe its hands down one of the most significant technological advances within a few years. Although it's an excellent invention, it has its flaws. One of the biggest problems in this technology is the number of transactions that can be made per second. I learned that only a certain amount of transactions could be added to the blockchain per second; I never really paid mind to it.

Transaction Speeds in 2020 and Beyond:

“One of the major benefits that blockchain-based cryptocurrency offers over traditional financial transactions is the speed at which these transactions can be made. While Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second, Paypal can only handle 193. Contrast this to Ripple, which can manage 1,500 transactions per second, and even Bitcoin Cash, which handles 60, and cryptocurrency looks to be catching up to the traditional methods. In fact, we'd go so far to say that how quickly the rest of the leading cryptocurrencies can handle transactions in 2020 will determine the industry’s trajectory. At present, Ethereum handles 20 transactions per second, while Bitcoin only handles seven transactions per second.”

Lightning Network can solve this problem, launched in March 2018, showing a solution to the large-scale transaction problems on the blockchain.

Transactions for the Future:

"Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Blockchain smart-contracts enforce security without creating an on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds."

"Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians."

"Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments."

"Cross Blockchains. Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in 3rd party custodians."

The development speed in bitcoin is incredibly fast. The large-scale transaction problem in BTC is being resolved with new updates and new networks that can make instant purchases this much easier to do. Instant purchases like we are accustomed to doing with fiat cash and credit cards. Check out if the site works for your country and try it out; I know I will!

By: Carolina Pérez

Twitter: @carolinaninap