A new service established by CoinCorner, a bitcoin exchange based in the Isle of Man, allows anyone to send a virtual greeting card with an amount of bitcoins attached to it.

BitGreet currently offers three types of Christmas card, one birthday card and one ‘thank you’ card. It plans to add a Valentine card before 14 February.

After selecting a card, sender should type in the message and receiver’s e-mail address, and specify the amount in Pounds Sterling to be sent. Then they confirm the amount in bitcoins. Until receiver claims the money, it is held in escrow by CoinCorner and can be retrieved by the sender. The service is completely free of charge. The sender does not have to upload any personal information, and the receiver does not need a bitcoin wallet to get the money.

According to Daniel Scott, co-founder of BitGreet, the CoinCorner team was “thinking of a fun way to try and increase bitcoin adoption in the office one afternoon. It was nearly Christmas at the time and we were in the festive spirit so we came up with the idea of a digital bitcoin Christmas card.”

Indeed, as Payment Week remarks, “if a teenager gets a $10 gift via Bitcoin, they will need to find a way to spend that money and that would help build a new generation of Bitcoin users, to say the least.”

Bitcoin enthusiasts like to make the cryptocurrency a part of their holidays. There are multiple ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day with bitcoin, some of them covered by CoinFox in the February article. Sharing bitcoins has also become a new tradition for Chinese New Year.

Alexey Tereshchenko