3 ms·

eventually someone needs to buy digital assets from apple for the cards to be worth anything

• jstanley 10y ago
  Not if a large enough group of people is willing to accept iTunes gift cards as payment. As long as they are a token that is sufficiently expensive to get hold of, I don't see why an economy can't work even if nobody ever spends them with Apple. It'd be like an economy based on gold coins in which nobody ever melts the coins down for their value as raw gold.
  • notahacker 10y ago
    My understanding is that the real bottleneck is that if you want to buy iTunes gift cards in large denominations you have to go to Apple or a reputable retailer and specifically ask the vendor to put up to $500 on the card and charge it to you. If you're doing that several times in a row to it probably ought to raise a flag with Apple, the vendor or possibly your bank. Relative to cash or gold, the token also has the not insignificant problem that it's time limited and can be secretly spent or voided, which should result in the card being substantially discounted (and checked for validity with Apple) each time it changes hands. It's also officially "not for resale"...
• mikeash 10y ago
  They'll be sold in small quantities to deal hunters on places like eBay, which will then be used like any other gift card. If you want to save a bit of money, you can find gift cards for all sorts of gift card on eBay for a bit of a discount. Lots of this activity is legitimate, with the cards being sold by people who got the cards as a gift but would rather have a somewhat smaller amount of cash. Scammers can just hop right in to this market.