A Story of Mr. Marco Agner.

First of all, I have this habit of doing stupid things from time to time and I’m not proud of that.

Doing a stupid thing

I want to live in Thailand for a year or so in the next year and on last September I decided to take a plane to Bangkok so I could see for myself if the country was as good as I was imagining — by the way, it is — before I got my one year visa and bought a plane ticket with no return date because I don’t do stupid things… Yeah… Sure.

And there I was, excited about going to Thailand with my Etihad ticket and ready to take twenty one hours of flight with an one hour connection in Abu Dhabi. Then I took 5,000 BRL (brazilian real) from my bank account which was worth something around 2,300 USD (U.S. dollar) at that time so I wouldn’t have to pay 6.38% in taxes charged by Brazil’s biggest mafia government for international credit card payments.

Twenty one hours long story short, I arrived in Thailand… Yay!

 

I bought something to eat with my dollars I had exchanged for brazilian real in Abu Dahbi — had ~40 dollars — and I just needed to exchange the rest of my BRL for the THB (thai baht) in some exchange. And this was my short conversation — not exactly because her english sucked and so did my thai =/ — with a polite thai lady in the exchange at the BKK airport when I showed her my money:

- We do not exchange the currency you have. ☺

- Oh, okay! No problem at all. Do you know where I can do it? ;D

“Bangkok is big and crazy and has everything everybody needs” I was confidently thinking. When she says:

- We do not exchange BRL in Thailand at all. ☺

- Oh, fuck. ขอบคุณครับ [thank you] :|

I tried many other exchanges and banks (a whole day) but the exchange lady was right and I was fucked.

Summary of my situation: for myself in Thailand with something around 40 USD, useless 5,000 BRL and without a thai bank account to send money from Brazil if I got desperate and accepted to pay all the expensive taxes and fees.

I was kind of fine with the situation. I do not react bad to difficult situations because it’s useless and I was confident that I would find a way like working in some hostel and other places or some other opportunity I could create but my trip in Thailand would get very limited. Now, I must admit I was already walking around Bangkok paying attention to some potential good places to sleep on the streets if I did not succeed in creating a solution for my money problem before I ran out of the 40 dollars I had.

Time to hustle!

Okay, I had one possible solution — not the only one — before selling my kidney… Yes, Bitcoin! And I was really excited about succeeding with this one.

I also had three major obstacles:

• I hadn’t taken my notebook computer to Thailand — another stupid thing I did but let’s just forget this one;
• My mobile phone wallet had exactly 0 bitcoin;
• I had to find someone to exchange bitcoin for thai baht personally because I did not have a thai bank account.

It was night after I walked around Bangkok trying to exchange my money which was a bad experience because I was feeling seasickness effects from the flight and doing this by foot was only possible because I travel light.

 

I got the cheapest street food I could find and a crappy room on Khaosan Road to stay for the night. I made sure they had Wi-Fi so I could find a local bitcoin exchanger and contact somebody I could trust in Brazil to send my bitcoins to my mobile phone wallet.

I used LocalBitcoins — a site to find local exchangers — to find a local exchanger who could do it personally and I found the user femmecoins who has many good feedbacks and a good price. I skyped femmecoins, explained what I needed,femmecoins made clear that only exchanged personally if it was 2 bitcoins or more and we scheduled a day and a time to exchange the money. Then, I skyped@ecopat to ask her to access my wallet, give her instructions of how to do it with my computer and send the bitcoins I needed to my mobile phone wallet. It was time to send my bitcoins to LocalBitcoins but my mobile phone wallet app just raised an error and closed for more than three times… Okay, I was really fucked (I had a backup for my mobile wallet but it was 21 hours aways from me by plane). So I closed my eyes, had a serious conversation with my phone, rebooted it, tried to open my wallet app again and… Yes! It worked and I was still on the game.

By the way, here’s the address that I used to receive my bitcoins in Thailand with all the transactions listed below. My transactions bottom-up:

• Received 0.1 BTC just to make sure everything was up and running;
• Received 1.8656 BTC from one wallet;
• Received 0.5 BTC from other wallet;
• Sent 0.001 BTC to LocalBitcoins just to make sure everything was okay again;
• Sent 2.3 BTC to LocalBitcoins wallet so I could send it to femmecoins with a escrow to make sure I had the thai baht in my hands before releasing the bitcoins;
• Sent 0.1643 BTC back to my wallet.

I was good to go and femmecoins fastly confirmed the meeting with me in a Starbucks I just needed a thai phone number to be able to call femmecoins if needed; we ended up just exchanging some SMS messages.

Finally, the easy part: the exchange. I arrived at the Starbucks we agreed. As soon as I got to there a beautiful and professional looking girl asked me if it was me who was going to exchange the bitcoins, we got two coffees and took a seat in a sofa to make the transaction. She started to count tens of thousands baht, then I did the same and, finally, released the bitcoins to femmecoins’ wallet on LocalBitcoins… Fast and easy. I was relieved and with a bunch of thai money plus useless brazilian paper I had to protect for over one month. After the transaction was done I was very relaxed and just comfortably enjoyed my coffee and a very clever conversation with my dear exchanger about how government and banks suck, and about cryptocurrencies’ huge potential in our world.

Some final words

The purpose of this post is not specifically explain cryptocurrencies’ potential but notice that for all transactions described above I just spent 0.30 USD for moving the money (not counting trader profit)… Yes, 30 cents of U.S. dollar to receive money on the other side of the planet in 10 minutes and exchange it for local currency. One other special thing was to see the currency I use everyday in Brazil being looked as a piece of worthless paper by everyone in the exchanges and banks… Because that’s all it was! My money was just a piece of worthless paper and worthless is what every currency in the world is until we agree or are forced to ~agree~ giving it a value — no exceptions. I already knew that very, very well thanks to my studies on Economics but living that in the real world was one of the greatest and most frustrating classes about money and its value I could ever have.

So, yes, I put my bet on a cryptographically backed and secured decentralized technology to serve the world as a currency and much more instead of an over printed, thus over inflated, currency which is only going to be worth less and less over time and is backed by nothing but the private interests of politicians and their fellow cronies. I opt out of supporting a system broken by design.