$800 billion spent annually on gift cards… What are we doing?

Noteworthy
3 min readNov 24, 2022

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Peter S. Brown, Senior Vice President, Sales at Noteworthy

We’re all guilty of it. We weren’t quite as on top of the holiday gift shopping as we had hoped and now time has run out. The easiest solution is that laziest of gift-giving options… the gift card.

Just recently, I started asking myself, what message does giving a gift card send to those who receive it and does this represent my personal values?

We understand that a gift card is usually given to the younger generation and it is in almost all circumstances just a means to more consumption of “stuff” they do not need. I’ve come to the conclusion that giving a Starbucks gift card to my nephew to buy three Venti Frappuccinos will have two certain outcomes. First, it will promote an unhealthy calorie consumption habit that negatively contributes to his well-being. Second, this most unremarkable and unimaginative gift will be completely forgotten in just a matter of hours after his final purchase.

It’s time to give cash-giving a reboot so that it better reflects our core values and what our hopes and dreams are for those few people in our lives who we give our regular expression of gift-giving to. We should ask ourselves, why are we gift-giving the means for profligate consumption when we could be gift-giving vital lessons about how to handle money while helping build the foundations for a brighter future?

With its intricate graphics and high-tech design features created by Swiss banknote designer Manuela Pfrunder, a cryptonote immediately shifts the emphasis of gift-giving away from consumption, and onto savings. With a little delayed gratification and a regular cadence of cryptonote gifts over the years, pretty soon our young saver starts looking a whole lot more like an investor as they stack more and more cryptonotes through dollar cost averaging (DCA) and track their physical crypto asset portfolio value on their Noteworthy app.

When the cumulative pile of 0.005 mBTC cryptonotes from each childhood birthday and Christmas combines with the crypto-sized returns on investment we’ve come to expect from Bitcoin, Junior could be sitting on a tidy sum of money that opens up significant new opportunities as they shove off to college.

In the end, meaningful and impactful gift giving comes down to how we choose to express our core values. Cryptonotes are a way to say that you care deeply about their future and that you wish to be remembered for playing a meaningful role to make it better. What could possibly be a better gift?

Cryptonotes are on sale today at https://noteworthy.ag/.

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