Purse: A Quickie Review

Disclosure: If you register with Purse using my affiliate link, and if you spend or earn more than 50USD worth of Bitcoin through Purse, I receive a 10 mBTC bonus from Purse (FWIW, you receive 10 mBTC from joining through the link as well).

I mentioned a few days ago that I was trying out Purse, a service that lets you order stuff from Amazon at a discount using Bitcoin. And I said that I'd review the service once I received the stuff I ordered (if, of course, I actually did receive the stuff I ordered).

Well, I received the stuff I ordered, and can confirm that the service works as advertised. It's really that simple. You sign up, you search for stuff you want to order and see a discounted price for it (I checked the Amazon site and yes, the price is actually discounted), you order the stuff, you pay for it with Bitcoin, and the stuff comes.

It's almost that simple. The two complexities not mentioned above are as follows:

1. Once you receive your order, you need to return to the Purse site and confirm that it arrived. Until you do that, your Bitcoin is held in escrow. I didn't notice that until just now, which means that Purse was kept waiting a couple of days to get its Bitcoin. My bad.
2. The regular discount is 5%, but there's an additional system through which you can "name your own discount." I haven't tried that. It looks like it may be a sort of arbitrage scheme where you pre-fund the purchase and then someone buys it for you when the amount of Bitcoin you've put in escrow for it goes up in USD value enough to cover the real price. But that's just a rough guess of how it works.

Anyway, pretty cool. It's a way to use Bitcoin in regular commerce.