The 5-member Dutch family started their dream with a VW California T6 camper van, and determined to use bitcoin to cover for their travel. The family has been surviving solely on bitcoin for the past four years. They invested everything on the wild blockchain when it was $900 a coin in 2017, liquidating everything from their retirement savings and cars to their clothes and accessories.
They have promised themselves that they would never charge for another service or product unless it was done in bitcoin. They mounted a bitcoin wallet on smartphones and exchanged bitcoin for cash after training about the cryptocurrency’s benefits.
The world’s cities adopting bitcoin
Since 2017, only by bitcoin, the Taihuttus have visited forty countries. The family has been able to trade exclusively in bitcoin due to the widespread acceptance of cryptocurrency in recent years; however, they still had to be inventive to get by.
The family has traversed much of Europe, Asia, and Oceania using a mix of exchanging money, negotiating, bitcoin debit cards, and pressuring vendors to adopt the cryptocurrency.
In Ljubljana, people used bitcoin to pay for items like car maintenance and movie tickets, and in Rovereto, you would use bitcoin to buy a motorcycle, pay your taxes, and have a haircut.
Using your bitcoin vs. keeping in your wallet
On Monday, the value of the currency hit an all-time high, closing in on $20,000, and several experts believe the cryptocurrency still has been potentially to rise.
This comeback rally, according to Mike Novogratz, CEO of investment company Galaxy Digital, is just getting underway. He expects bitcoin to reach $60,000 by the end of the year. In a study intended for Citibank’s institutional clients and accessed by CNBC, Tom Fitzpatrick, global head of CitiFXTechnicals, said the charts indicated that bitcoin would hit $318,000 by December 2021.
With such lofty expectations, it’s no surprise that more buyers are opting to store rather than spend their cryptocurrency.
Live on Bitcoin, you accept the instability
According to Chainalysis, a blockchain forensics company, the number of accounts buying more than a million dollars worth of bitcoin and then moving it off exchanges is up 180 percent from 2017 to 2020. According to data from Glassnode, 95% of bitcoin’s market capitalization is kept in wallets that carry several bitcoins.
Data points like this often indicate that richer investors are putting their money. Retail greed drove the bitcoin boom in 2017, but in 2020, it would be billionaires and companies that are purchasing bitcoin in bulk and, in some situations, moving it offline for protection reasons.
Bitcoin is a currency or a commodity?
The function of bitcoin varies from buying, selling, and pricing products, and major fintech companies such as PayPal now accept bitcoin as payment.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, functions similarly to gold and oil. Its value is very unpredictable, there is a demand where it can be purchased and sold, and, like most currencies, you can bet about bitcoin’s potential price using the futures market. Also, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission classified bitcoin as a commodity in the United States in 2015.
Even Taihuttu, who has been using bitcoin as his primary means of payment for nearly half a decade, claims that the coin’s function is fundamentally evolving.
