-What led you to decide to “give up” everything and live only with Bitcoin?
I lost my mother when I was 24 and she was 48 at that time. I couldn’t face the emotions so I became a workaholic and started to build my own company. I Became a very materialistic guy that wanted to have everything and in a way neglected the family life because of this. When my father called me around Christmas 2014 and told me he was diagnosed with cancer and had one more year to live my world crashed. I decided to spend as much as possible time in 2015 with my family and father so I hired a manager to run the companies. My father died in January 2016 and after organising the inheritance and funeral etc I got a burn out. I decided to take a break with the family and travel for a few months. Those few months changed in the life we are living now. When a friend called me in Bali in jan 2017 to check my BTC and Doge coins I realised that the revolution was starting and my entrepreneurship told me I wanted to be part of this huge change in the world. I asked my wife what she thought of going all-in BTC.
-What did the rest of the family think?
At first it was a shock and she didn’t believe me but when I sold my cars online and bought BTC for that she started to believe me. We both agreed that we had been living a crazy too materialistic life and spoiled our kids too much. We needed to change life and teach our kids that money is not the most important thing in life. Living and doing what makes you happy is the most important thing. We decided the only way to teach our kids this is to show it. You can tell it your kids but they will only understand it when you do it yourself as well. So we decided to go for it, flew home, sold the house etc and went all-in.
-During your stay in Spain, how have you seen the Bitcoin panorama and what have been the greatest advantages and disadvantages that you have found in the country?
The biggest advantage is that you can buy bitcoins in more than 20.000 stores because of Bitnovo which is amazing. Buying bitcoins with cash at a Hyperber, carrefour, Fnac etc is crazy cool and simplifying it for people to buy BTC. I don’t think there are many countries in the world where you can buy bitcoins in a grocery store, hahaha. The biggest disadvantage is that I haven’t found many places that really accept bitcoin as a payment. I found a few restaurants and a comic book store in Benidorm for example but in average the adoption can be better. I do think this will change as the crypto community in Spain is awesome and organising many informative evenings etc. Of course now during the flu situation there were not many conferences etc but normally Spain hosts amazing crypto and blockchain conferences. Also very cool is that Spain is hosting some amazing crypto projects like socios yes I am the proud owner of Barca tokens Yeahhhh and Bitsa (the only crypto debit card for the youth from 14 years old).
-The greengrocers on the corner or the nearest supermarket do not usually accept BTC, to pay for services and food, have you had to change to fiat currency?
Yes of course most of them sell bitcoin but don’t accept bitcoin directly as a payment. I do ask it of course every time agin and again and I can see in the reactions more and more people now know what bitcoin is. 3 years ago if you asked it at a greengrocer they looked at you like wtf is bitcoin hahaha We mostly buy online coupons at bitrefill for example that you than ca use to pay or pay with our crypto debit cards like Bitsa or Crypto-com. But again I think this will change in the future as more and more people will understand that Bitcoin is here to stay and not only a safe have for if the economy will collapse but also usable as a payment tool. For us its a game to find creative ways to not use the traditional monetary system but I also realise that these crypto debit cards we sometimes need to use are not the true plan of Bitcoin but will be a step in between to the creation of a new monetary system.
-How do you deal with Bitcoin price declines?
Not, hahah you just get used too these fluctuations. At the same time we are no materialistic family and have no fear for the future. If BTC crashed to 0, we will be bankrupt and start over again with a new adventure in life. Life needs to be an adventure and not a boring hamster wheel ride. You learn to play the game and when bitcoin dips we hedge into stable currencies and buy bitcoin back cheaper. Trading is one of the income sources for our family.
-Had you already started your adventure when the great fall of BTC in 2017, after 20k? If so, how did they cope?
We just went with the flow and lived a minimalistic life with no focus on wealth but family. If you don’t need a lot of money every month why would you bother about what you have in the long term. Life can go fast and we choose to enjoy life today and not worry about tomorrow.
-Have you ever lost faith in Bitcoin?
No Never, even gained more trust!! The longer Bitcoin exists and is non stop 24/7 up online, not hacked etc. Name one other asset/company that has been non stop running for 11 years 24/7 without one single failure.
-What are your predictions for the price of Bitcoin in the short term and in relation to the recent halving? And in the long term?
I think we are in the bull market and now in the part of the cycle that will take bitcoin to a new ATH. No this won’t happen tomorrow but in the next 18 months we will see a new ATH. If I need to give a number let’s say 20k at Christmas end of 2021 between 50k to 200k. It all depends on the macro economics etc. If our governments keep printing money, more and more money will flow into BTC. Understand that the generation X and Boomers (both generations that hold most of the money) , will hedge into BTC as the new gold. They want to protect their capital and have been using gold for this for a very long time but you can see they are shifting to BTC more and more!! If you Talk long time as in 10 years, yes I believe we will fly to the moon!!
-What do you think is the best way to boost the adoption of Bitcoin?
It’s difficult to push people as most people don’t liked to be pushed. It will happen naturally as the world economy is slowly collapsing and people will search for more privacy. I think it will happen in this way:
1) Governments are creating centralised forms of cryptocurrency like the CBDC or the Digital Yuan
2) Government will make the world cashless
3) Everybody will only use digital forms of payment and realise the lost their complete privacy by using these centralised cryptos
4) people will search for privacy currencies and decentralised in opposite to the by governments created centralised ones.
5) Now they understand the power of BTC, DASH, XMR, LTC and all the other cryptos that provide them of the privacy they were used to have with the cash money we now use daily.
Yes this will take some time but every big change in the world takes time.
-Have you ever used another cryptocurrency? which?
Yes many, LTC, XVG, XMR, DASH, BCH
We use any crypto that is accepted in stores to buy what we need. We support the whole crypto industry!
-How did you explain to the little girls of the house what Bitcoin is?
In the beginning I just told them it’s a combination of gold and cash money that will give the poor kids in the world the same chances they had as kids. Kids spend more and more time in in digital worlds like MineCraft and Roblox etc where they use Robux ( a digital form of money) The grow up with digital tokens and understand the power of this huge social economic change.
-How has COVID affected you when using bitcoin?
To be honest I don’t really believe that COVID is a killer virus. It is just a flu like we had many and this will show in the numbers after a year. As we all know most of the people they now register as a Covid death, died because they had another decease as well. The amount of people that really died solely because of Covid is way lower than the totals you see in the news. I feel very sorry for all the people that have died or lost family but I also feel very sorry for of 3 million children that die every year because of poor nutrition and hunger. That’s nearly half of all deaths in children under the age of 5. Globally, 822 million people suffer from undernourishment.
“ If printing money is so easy, why don’t we print a shitload of money to safe those people from dying out of hunger?”
Covid has not changed the use of bitcoin for us but I think it has contributed to the need of cryptocurrencies in other parts of the world. People needed to send money while in lockdown and the cost of use of western union compared to crypto is huge! It did affect our travel plans but we are creative and always find solution. Thats one of the advantages of not owning a house etc, you can always move to a place that fits your life better or where you don’t need to wear a facemask while walking through town.
-Of all the places you have been, which one have you had the best experience and ease when using BTC?
The best use of crypto till now I found in Rovereto Italy and BTC city in Ljubljana Slovenia. In those two towns I can completely live on direct bitcoin payment for literally everything we need as a family. Food, entertainment, housing etc check our YouTube videos we made about visiting these two places. You will be amazed. Slovenia Ljubljana https://youtu.be/W8i4nzzGn1k. Rovereto Italy https://youtu.be/YSJP9rUHpZ0
-Any particular or curious anecdote that you can tell?
Oh I have so many of them but I would your readers to watch them on our YouTube channel as we share our life etc there, hahaha. I rather tell you what I am doing now and what we as family are going to do in the future. I am an ambassador for HouseofDao in thailand and BlockchainValley in Bulgaria. Two amazing projects that are focussing on creating co-working and living communities that want to work and live together to change this world. You really need to check them out as many of the readers will love to spend some time there.
You will also love what we are going to do the next 3 months as you are the first to hear. We will do a tour in a very cool way that is made possible by MachinaTrader.com (main sponsor) and PrimeXBT.com Together with these two amazing projects we are going to create some real cool media the next couple of months, yeahhhh. Yes we will do everything to support this amazing industry 24/7 as a family and we are thankful for everyone that has been supporting us. Oh yeah and last but not least you need to understand that from all the crypto and money we earn with YouTube, book sales, speaking at conferences etc we donate a huge part to charity, poor people we meet during travels and build projects so that those people can build a better future for them selves.
Thats why I always end my videos with “ You need to zoom out in crypto and zoom in at life” Don’t spend too much time freaking out about bitcoin minute charts and try to enjoy every single minute of the day as that is exactly why life is worth living.
