Colin Harper

The Lightning Torch, a Lightning Network payment that has been forwarded to bitcoiners around the world via Twitter, has run its course and reached its end in the charitable hands of Bitcoin Venezuela.

It’s grown a lot since we last covered it in February. In fact, the term “Torch” doesn’t seem to do it justice anymore. At this point, it could rightly be called a bonfire.

Admittedly, it’d be impossible to pass a bonfire around the world (a Torch sounds much more feasible), but the Lightning Torch doesn’t care much for the impossible or implausible. Ten years ago, the prospect of passing a digital payment to every continent shy of Antarctica would have been unthinkable. Even less thinkable: this payment chain would be passed uninterrupted (well, mostly uninterrupted, save two kinks) over 275 times with hardly anyone’s own opportunism getting the better of it.

It’s intersected with economically sanctioned countries like Iran, fallen into the hands of a Finnish model, been highly publicized after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took part and become a gleaming example of bitcoin’s resilience as a currency that has no regard for borders, edicts or politics.

As the Torch enters its final stretch, it has cleared a series of significant hurdles; from escaping greedy hands to transcending economic sanctions, the Torch has more than lived up to the hopes of its Prometheus.

“I never expected it to go anywhere,” Hodlonaut, the Torch’s creator, told Bitcoin Magazine. “It was just a fun little thing that I did; it’s not like I sat and planned this out.”

Igniting the Flame

Like any Twitter trend that goes viral within a niche community, the Lightning Torch began as a bit of “fun.” Hodlonaut, whom I have described as an astronautical tomcat before (and will again and again), wanted to spread excitement for and awareness of the Lightning Network, so he decided to send 100,000 satoshis to the first person in his tweet thread that he trusted.

It came with a catch — or at least an expectation. The recipient would have to add 10,000 sats and then pass it on to someone else, then that person would add more, and so on.

“If somebody asked me on the first day, ‘How far do you think it would go?’ I would have said, ‘10 or 20 hops,’” Hodlnaut recalled. Turns out, he was lowballing it. After 292 passes, it would reach the 4.29 million satoshi limit Hodlonaut set for it.

The seminal passes were mainly lowkey Bitcoin enthusiasts and/or professionals just looking to get in on the fun. They included a couple of duplicate passings, as interest wasn’t fully fledged. Everything ran pretty smoothly during the Torch’s first days and (nearly) everyone played nice. I say “nearly” because, on the 14th pass, the Torch ran into a problem.

sirLordBTC (who, with an EPIC name like that, we’re not surprised tried to screw the system), absconded with the Torch when it was worth under $10. So, all in all, it’s not like he profited much from his sophomoric trick — he likely just wanted to be a contrarian little edgelord.

Hodlonaut actually predicted that, after those first 10 to 20 successful hops, at some point the Torch would be stolen. Technically, his foresight was accurate but, thankfully, the sender, Ruben Johansen, refueled the Torch with 250,000 satoshi and passed it along to someone else. Cracking on, the only other trouble the Torch had would come at 2.51 million satoshis, when pseudonymous user eduard_btc decided to “seize” it because he could.

He received a lot of heat in the ensuing Twitter thread, wherein he justified his decision with the whole “don’t trust, verify” schtick. Still, he eventually buckled under the communal pressure as the general consensus was that he was acting like a jerk, so he sent it back to sender Klaus Lovegreen, who had already pledged to reup the balance and pass it on to a more trustworthy individual.

Building Heat

Barring those two outlying users, the Torch’s movement has been largely uninterrupted. And it eventually made its way to plenty of big name bitcoiners.

An early one of these was Pierre Rochard. A staunch Bitcoin maximalist, Rochard’s popular Lightning node launcher has garnered him a reputation for being one of the space’s premier Lightning Network enthusiasts and educators, so it made sense that he’d hop on so early, and it’s fitting that he’d get to take part.

From here, the flame would pass between the hoi polloi and high profiles alike. Jack Mallers, Brooke Mallers, Nicolas Dorier, D. Dickerson, John Carvalho and the Bitrefill team, Armin Van Bitcoin, Zack Voel, Anthony Pompliano and even Andreas Antonopoulos would all hold the Torch before it hit the 150 passes mark. Halfway to 300 passes, the Torch’s popularity definitely reached a tipping point.

At this juncture, Matt Odell reached out to Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, who responded by sending Odell an invoice. Crypto Twitter freaked out, the news made industry (and mainstream) media headlines and the Torch’s prominence blazed forth, putting it in the hands of even more bitcoin (and other cultural) leaders.

From Dorsey, it would go to Lightning Labs Co-Founder Elizabeth Stark. The next 85 passes would be populated by industry heavyweights like Samson Mow, Riccardo Spagni, Alena Satoshi, Whale Panda, Giacomo Zucco, Changpeng Zhao (who took the opportunity to shill BNB), Justin Sun (who took the opportunity to shill TRON), Erik Voorhees, Meltem Demoirs, the BitMEX Research team, Ben Davenport, Randy Brito, the CoinGecko team, Boxmining, Mia Tam, Andy Cheung, Charlie Shrem, Vijay Boyapati, Adam Back, Reid Hoffman — and even the team here at Bitcoin Magazine.

Later on in its lifespan, it would also pass through the hands of the team at Slush Pool, Peter Wuille, Jill Carlson, Laura Shin, Peter McCormack, the “Free Ross Ulbricht” campaign and our own Aaron van Wirdum.

With names like these partaking, the Torch’s popularity was hotter than ever. What started as a fun experiment had grown into a cultural movement of sorts with multiple components. This memetic metamorphosis (both the cultural evolution of the Torch and its meme value) has even been chronicled in the artistic renderings of CryptoScamHub. In short, the Torch became immensely popular and graduated to full meme status; the tracking of it has become a sort of pastime in the bear market and big names fanned its popularity.

But this popularity also had the unintended consequence of shutting common bitcoiners out. Some on Twitter complained that the surplus of elites vying for the Torch meant that they had become overrepresented in the pool of passers. Tweeting his opinion, Hodlonaut agreed and suggested that it would be wise to keep the process from devolving into exclusivity.

“It looked at some point like it would turn into something that was unavailable to the common guy,” he told Bitcoin Magazine. “I think fortunately we ended up with a good balance overall. There have been periods of only high-profile people, but pretty organically, it ended up in the hands of lower-profile people.”

Circumventing Sanctions, Reaching Disadvantaged Populations

Following a particularly long strand of high-flying passers which ended with Bitcoin Magazine, the Torch not only landed in the hands of under-the-radar bitcoiners, but it would blaze on in some of the areas that need bitcoin the most.

“Bitcoin is a safe-haven,” Ziya Sadr, an Iranian Bitcoin enthusiast and technology writer who took the Torch, told Bitcoin Magazine.

Around the time we took the Torch, a groundswell of community sentiment was pushing for Sadr to accept the Torch on behalf of Iran. The symbolic move would speak volumes to the power of permissionless, censorship-resistant currency, given the international sanctions that have economically annexed the country from the bulk of the world and its government’s repressive stance against technology and financial tools (bitcoin being no exception here).

There was a general fear that, as a financial instrument, bitcoin is prone to the financial sanctions that the U.S. government has levied against Iran. As a U.S.-based company, Bitcoin Magazine’s owner, BTC Inc, didn’t want to take the risk. We even asked the U.S. Treasury on Twitter if sending bitcoin to Iran this way would be permissible (and didn’t get a reply).

So we sent it to Welsh bitcoiner Bitgeiniog instead, who (as promised) passed it on to Sadr in what they called a “cypherpunk, authoritarian-busting move.” For Sadr, who believes that the fretting over sanctions “triggered people to think that bitcoin isn’t what it’s meant to be: a tool to defy censorship which will not conform to governments and sanctions,” the historic moment was incredibly moving and had a significant impact on the Iranian Bitcoin community.

“It was a very bold and public experiment, getting in touch with sanctioned people, people who are exiled from the rest of the world,” he said. “This carried a lot of optimism for the Iran Bitcoin community, and this community represents the rest of people in Iran: the Bitcoin community has people from every category; there are businessmen, investors, entrepreneurs, teachers. It gave us promise; it proved to us that Bitcoin is borderless.”

Hodlonaut said something similar about the Iranian pass in our conversation, namely that the “main takeaway [is that the Torch] connects people directly.”

Sadr said that this gesture of goodwill shows that the Iranian Bitcoin community, which some of us in the West may ignore, “is on equal ground” with the rest of the world.

I’d venture to say they’re even on higher ground. In a country where MasterCard and PayPal are banned (and your bank account can be frozen if you’re caught transacting with either), bitcoin offers a tenable alternative to an unstable economic climate.

It even opens up access to the web at large, said Sadr. He purchased a virtual private network using bitcoin from NordVPN, something he couldn’t dream of doing with the rial, given international sanctions. Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, you name it — all of these are blocked in Iran, but they’re accessible with a VPN.

Sadr, who freelances in exchange for bitcoin to make ends meet, said that bitcoin is increasing in popularity as the rial’s value plummets. People are attracted to earning their wages in foreign currency and bitcoin is more attractive still, given its ability to circumvent the government’s vice grip on personal finances.

“There’s a very active black market — everything is a black market in Iran. Foreign currency markets are black market, so it’s actually the norm,” Sadr said.

LocalBitcoins and Telegram chats are part of this black market and have become common watering holes, and there are two Iran-specific exchanges that people will use to trade, despite the government’s best efforts to block the URLs to these sites.

For the Iranian Bitcoin community and its online hubs, Sadr said that “the number has been growing, even though it’s a bear market — we still see, regardless of all the FUD that’s being spread in the media and the space, the numbers are growing in the communities that I’m active in.”

As part of the Persian New Year custom, Sadr and his bitcoin buddies have been giving people money. But for this year’s holiday, they’re not passing out rials — they’re sending sats through the Lightning Network or through mainnet. He thinks that the token of gratitude will help to educate his countrymen and help ease their access to a financial system that they otherwise might not be able to leverage.

“I meet a lot of people who know that they can use bitcoin to transfer money easily, but they just haven’t tried it yet,” Sadr said.

The Torch’s Legacy

The situation in Iran calls to memory Venezuela’s own political and economic hardship. The Torch has made it there, too — multiple times in fact. The Torch ultimately reached Bitcoin Venezuela, a charity organization which has fed thousands of economically dispossessed citizens thanks to cryptocurrency donations. As its final bearer, Bitcoin Venezuela will blow the Torch out and transmute its altruistic embers into food, necessities and medicine for Venezuelans in need. A number of community members have pledged to match this donation.

The Lightning Torch may have begun as fun, but its intersection with economically and politically destabilized areas is anything but trivial. Its ability to transcend borders, nationalities and ideologies is testament to the fact that Satoshi’s gift to the world (and its grassroots community) is resilient and, by and large, chock-full of goodwill.

“I think that says a lot about this community,” Hodlonaut mused. “People are good in this space. I’ve seen so much positive stuff coming out of this.”

The “random” and “organic” trajectory of the Torch, he continued, “tells volumes about the global nature of bitcoin.” Sure as Satoshi, the proof is in the numbers.

In total, 278 unique participants from 56 countries have sent the Torch to every continent except for Antarctica (though one passer did place their phone on a rock from Antarctica while receiving it, but that really only counts in spirit). Just over 7 BTC has been transacted (roughly 700 million satoshis!) over a period of 83 days.

So inspiring is this experiment-turned-movement that it has spawned offshoots. Obscure altcoin Ravencoin had an on-chain version, and there’s one called the Tiny Torch that has taken off on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, too. While he had it, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee intimated that he would fork the Torch to Litecoin’s Lightning Network. This didn’t go over too well, though, and Lee eventually removed the tweet with this claim (some saw it as self-promotion and Hodlonaut wanted to make sure there was no confusion between offshoots and the #LNTrustChain hashtag that has demarcated the Torch’s movement).

Hodlonaut doesn’t want the original to fork either, less it get “stale.” He said that a finish line is necessary and that, without it, the Torch loses its significance.

He also told Bitcoin Magazine that keeping track of the Torch’s movement and documenting the phenomenon on its website has been a taxing, “around the clock” job. Given how much impact the Torch has had, we asked him what would be next when this was all over.

“I think I need a vacation,” he chuckled in response.

Well, he’s more than earned one, and thanks to the number of ancillary torches that have proliferated under the light of the original, he can take his rest while the influence of his creativity shines forth in multiple iterations. Much like Satoshi passing the Torch of his creation to a decentralized community of developers and enthusiasts, Hodlonaut’s ingenuity has been passed to a community eager to continue this exercise of trust.

So, the Lightning Torch’s creator can take his vacation; Bitcoin doesn’t take vacations.

To see all of the places the Torch has been, you can track its movements here. If you would like to join others in donating to Bitcoin Venezuela, please visit the charity’s website.

To donate to causes aiding those in Venezuela, please visit #AirdropVenezuela’s website or Bitcoin Venezuela’s website. To partake in cryptograffiti’s charity auction, please visit the donation page and tune in to the live stream here.

“Literally and figuratively, the Venezuelan people are bringing down Maduro.”

This is how cryptograffiti described his latest work, a charity piece that he will be auctioning off online through a live stream in Colombia. The mural, constructed entirely of 1,000 bolivars, is painted over with a portrait of Nicolas Maduro, the autocratic leader of Venezuela whose power has been constitutionally challenged by opposition leader Juan Guaido since January of this year. In the painting, Maduro’s mouth is censored with a blue bar bearing the hashtag #AirdropVenezuela, an ironic nod to the political and economic repressions the Venezuelan people have endured while also applauding their ability to persevere through this hardship.

As usual with the crypto artist’s symbolic and subversive work, the auction comes with a twist — a deconstructive one.

With each donation, a bolivar from the mural will be torn off by a Venezuelan citizen. Broadcasted from Cúcuta, Colombia, a city bordering Venezuela, the cross-border protest will allow the Venezuelans to vent political frustrations and simultaneously attract donations for aid.

“The piece-by-piece dismantling of the bolivars by those choosing to donate crypto is meant to represent a new beginning made possible by a new form of money not controlled by any one authority. There is also symbolism in how these donations have the ability to come from outside of a region known for heavily regulated currency controls,” cryptograffiti told Bitcoin Magazine.

The auction will also accompany a live art session where Venezuelan children will create pieces to be sold at a later date.

Since the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013, the policies of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro have thrown the country into economic and social turmoil. With an economy ravaged by hyperinflation, rampant poverty and crime have furnished a worsening humanitarian crisis. The crisis reached a bloody impasse on February 21, 2019, as Venezuelan forces opened fire on protesters at the Brazilian border after the government refused to accept humanitarian aid.

It’s proven difficult for aid to penetrate the country’s borders. But bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become a vestige of monetary hope for Venezuelan expats who want to send money back home, and cryptograffiti’s auction will leverage crypto’s borderless nature to buy aid from within the country.

In a partnership with AirTM as part of their #AirdropVenezuela campaign, cryptograffiti is directing all donations, which can come by way of cash deposits on AirTM, bitcoin and a host of altcoins, to the philanthropic campaign. As a wider effort, AirdropVenezuela’s goal is to send $1,000,000 worth of cryptocurrencies to 100,000 families in Venezuela. Even just $10 worth of cryptocurrencies “can help a family purchase food, medicine, and scarce imported goods. Access to digital money can help introduce Venezuelans to cryptocurrencies, online freelancer platforms, ecommerce, investments, donations and other income generating web-based opportunities,” the campaign states.

For the art auction in particular, the charity collective has set its fundraising goal at $10,000. Fifty percent of these funds will go to rebuilding the auction venue, the Fundación Renacer, a daycare that provides support for families affected by the financial crisis, while the remaining 50 percent will be distributed with the rest of the funds raised by AirdropVenezuela at the end of April.

Crypto education company Cripto Conserje will oversee the reconstruction of the daycare, and during the auction, it will host information sessions on how to access, use and store cryptocurrencies, including teaching attendees how to use coins distributed at the event to purchase food kits from one of the auction’s partners.

This education will hopefully unlock crypto’s potential for an economically disenfranchised population that needs it most. For Venezuelans, bitcoin and the like can provide a censorship-resistant method to store and transfer value, something AirTM’s services are trying to make more accessible for Latin American and, more urgently, Venezuelan citizens who lack access to robust banking and a sound currency. The application accommodates more than 200 deposit and withdrawal methods, including crypto, to convert currencies to USD in order to store value and protect it “from possible devaluations.”

When bitcoin is used in Venezuela, it is often as a go-between for a foreign currency and the bolivar or some other, stronger one like the dollar.

Eduardo Gomez, head of support at Purse.io, for example, told Bitcoin Magazine that when Venezuelan expats send money back home with bitcoin, they will typically sell it through LocalBitcoins to a Venezuelan trader, who will then deposit bolivars into the bank account of the expat’s relative. As the economic situation has only degraded further in 2018-2019, LocalBitcoins has seen rapidly increasing trading volumes in Venezuela.

Occasionally, your technically minded Venezuelans will sell the bitcoin themselves for USD (or another foreign currency) and deposit that money into a foreign bank account as savings. Either way, cryptocurrencies typically serve just as an intermediary for value transfer, one that circumvents the tight remittance controls and fee gouging that the Venezuelan government effects with its monopoly over currency conversion and international money transfers.

The AirdropVenezuela campaign wants to take the extra step in getting beneficiaries to use crypto instead of relying on Venezuela’s failing fiat currency. The campaign will donate and educate these citizens on crypto’s significance in their situation, as well as alerting them to online economies that may allow them to receive crypto as payment, such as freelancing.

This is how Gomez, who has been living on bitcoin since 2012, is pulling his family out of poverty. He began receiving bitcoin for freelance translation work online, and after leaving Venezuela, he trades bitcoin for bolivars on LocalBitcoins to send his family funds.

Cryptograffiti hopes his latest work will expose a grim situation which has continued to experience much deserved attention under the international spotlight as of late. But as much as it exposes the severity of the situation, he hopes that the part-performance art, part-visual art will reveal (and convince people of) the solution to these economic woes.

“After reciting the tired ‘maybe it doesn’t apply as directly to you, but Bitcoin is important in authoritarian regimes’ line one too many times, I wanted to do something to contribute to Venezuela and experience the situation first-hand,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about collaborative art as of late and how it helps spread the message and engage viewers. This led me down the path of a mural that was made up of many different parts that would be interactive in some fashion.”

After the auction is over, two pieces — Maduro’s left and right eyes — will be signed by cryptograffiti and one will be sent to the highest bidder based on his or her preference. The other will go to another donor chosen at random.

Cryptograffiti’s auction is the latest in artist-led philanthropy efforts. Billionaire business mogul Richard Branson hosted a charity concert in Cúcuta last Friday. Branson hoped the concert would raise awareness and some £100 million for the people of Venezuela, and it attracted an appearance by opposition leader Guaido.

In the realm of crypto philanthropy, Bitcoin Venezuela, a charity organization founded by Randy Brito, also exports bitcoin funding for aid inside the country. Subsisting on donations in the ballpark of $100, the organization sends funds into the country to workers on the ground who provide food, clothes, medical supplies and other provisions to struggling Venezuelans. Once the Lightning Torch, a Lightning network payment experiment that has been making global rounds, reaches the network’s channel limit, its creator, hodolnaut, intends to have the final sum donated to the charity.

Image courtesy of cryptografitti.

This is the fifth instalment of reporter Colin Harper’s “Living on Bitcoin” experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 , onDay 4 and on Day 5.

On day six I woke with a renewed sense of energy. My last two days in San Francisco were booked up with plenty to do, and yesterday’s purchase had reinvigorated the experiment’s sense of purpose.

That morning I wrote, paid Kashmir back for the breakfast (she got into her Coinbase account) and set out for two days of Bay Area shenanigans that would include meeting a local crypto artist, getting tipsy with bitcoin and sleeping (and sailing) in the East Bay on a boat that threatened to capsize.

Around 1:00 p.m. I caught an Uber into the Financial District to meet up with Dustin, a multi-talented developer who had responded to a Reddit thread I made leading up to my week here. He invited me sailing, but the weather was sketchy — it had been raining for the better part of my time in San Francisco and there were winds and storms in the forecast — so we decided to meet at Digital Garage, a coworking space on Market Street that accommodates many cryptocurrency projects.

I was loitering in the lobby when he passed me, and we registered who the other was immediately. Big, tall, bearded with long, blonde hair, a tremendous smile and goofy disposition, he crossed from the other end of the lobby to greet me.

He’s got the hair, the beard, the “No worries, dude” vibe. We’re going to get along great.

We did.

As we entered the working space, I was pleased to see a cryptograffiti original on prominent display, which added an air of authenticity to both his presence in the space and to the San Francisco crypto community for supporting a local, industry-specific artist.

Posting up at a table in the working space, we hit it off and began jumping from one crypto topic to the next. Turns out, he’s a lone-wolf dev who’s building a hardware wallet with bluetooth-enabled mobile controls — not unlike Ledger’s own Nano X, I suggested. He hadn’t heard of it before.

“Well, they might have the bluetooth, but I doubt it’s trustless and multi-sig,” he tells me, going on to say that he knows of no other trustless hardware wallet. Interest piqued, I surveyed his app and the hardware wallet prototype, which he’s also building himself.

“You’re just a one-man band, aren’t ya?” I remarked, impressed, after learning that he was building everything himself.

He’s a bit of a crypto OG, it seems. He’s been in the space since 2011 and hangs around the Bitcoin Core internet relay chat (IRC), where he says he’s been humbled on a few occasions. I asked for his veteran perspective to help explain why I couldn’t find any more stores in the area that accept bitcoin. He suggests that it’s intertwined in the same trend that has made Silicon Valley so banal to him.

“Bitcoin has really exacerbated the aspects of Silicon Valley I don’t like,” he admits. “It has an appreciation for altcoins or stablecoins, but not really for bitcoin, hard money. I think there’s this culture in San Francisco that just idolizes what investors like, what’s new. I heard someone say Silicon Valley is about new things — bitcoin isn’t new anymore.”

Everyone’s just looking for “the next big thing” or “the next Bitcoin.” They’re not going to find it, was more or less his view, and he believes that the focus shouldn’t be creating something new but improving what we already have.

“I’ve heard it said that the East Coast owns things while the West Coast makes things,” he theorized, “and if that stereotype were true I could see more people taking bitcoin.

“I think the challenge is that the majority of people don’t understand security stuff. The people who buy these don’t understand half of it. The challenge is teaching them,” he said, broaching the evergreen topic on the “how-tos” of adoption.

Our conversation was kinetic and animated as we touched on a wide range of crypto-related topics. I’m not surrounded by developers much in Nashville (especially not crypto/blockchain ones), so the opportunity to talk to one who knew the ins-and-outs (and knew them real well) left my curiosity welling with streams of new, if half-hatched, bitcoin applications and infrastructural ideas.

We talked crypto assets insurance (a concept which we both had previously hatched complementary business models for), his conceptualization that the network serves users and not miners (he believes that “hashing wars” are irrelevant, since, ultimately, the users will decide which chain they buy in to) and his surprising penchant for interacting with some of the space’s most prodigious and controversial celebrities without knowing who they are.

At one point, he had left his laptop at the Crypto Castle only to retrieve it, unmolested, from the same couch he left it on a month later, though he didn’t really know who Jeremy was. I brought up Brock Pierce and his benevolent-or-parasitic (depends on who you ask) ventures in Puerto Rico. When Dustin was still involved in the Valley’s tech party scene, he was acquainted with him before either even knew about bitcoin.

“Ohhh, that’s Brock Pierce. I know him — I just didn’t know his name. We used to party a lot 10 years ago. That’s hilarious.”

Everyone knows everyone in this industry, and the degrees of separation between connections is often slim. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but with Bitcoin.

He would reaffirm this observation throughout our talks. For instance, he had applied for Coinbase back in 2013, a job he didn’t end up getting — though Armstrong’s consolation prize was pretty nice.

“He gave me a bitcoin,” he said, smiling and holding up his hands like he was holding something ethereal. “It was like 34 bucks then.”

The literal token of gratitude for being one of Coinbase’s first applicants.

That would have been sometime in 2013, maybe even right before Hill’s article. Funny, he was probably up for the position of Coinbase’s third employee.

I ordered some pad thai for lunch on Uber Eats, tried to manage some work but was ultimately distracted by my on-going, engaging conversations with Dustin. He’d agreed to go with me to the Bitcoin meetup at Stookey’s that night. To kill time until then, we decided we would give BitPay an office visit. I wanted to ask them about the decreasing presence of bitcoin-accepting merchants in the bay area, and see if the trend was national and global.

I called the office but only succeeded in leaving a voicemail, so we decided that running the errand on foot would give us our best shot. BitPay has two offices listed on Google. One was, no doubt, a mailing address but we had no way of figuring out which one.

The rain-soaked walk was made easier thanks to our umbrellas (Hans had graciously loaned me his, a feeble but functional black pocket umbrella). On our way, we took a detour so that I could try out a bitcoin ATM.

The experience wasn’t as gratifying as I had hoped, mainly because it didn’t feel like actually buying bitcoin — it was more like buying credit or a coupon for bitcoin, the opposite of what I had been doing all week: using bitcoin to buy credit and coupons in the form of gift cards.

The Coinme ATM was located in something of a mall a block over from the Moscone Center. I decided to use cash, but upon using the machine, any chance of anonymity was promptly thwarted.

First, it asks you to insert your ID, followed by a request to take a picture to verify that identity (that I would have to basically do know-your-customer (KYC) verifications twice to buy bitcoin with cash was anathema to me). After this it asked me for my phone number and email address, which I found ironically less intrusive after having to be photo identified. When all this was done, it printed a slip of paper with a username and password, along with a URL at which I could access the $10 worth of bitcoin I had bought.

Cool, I can’t even access it yet and don’t even hold the keys. Certainly different from when Hill used a makeshift, trustless prototype at Internet Archives in 2013 before the first crypto ATMs had been produced. Back then, it was just a computer and a cash box, which any employee could use to withdraw or deposit bitcoin for cash. Same concept, but more anonymous, easy and endearingly janky (you had to trust people not to steal cash from it, though).

The disheartening and borderline frustrating experience (it felt a bit cheap, a normal monetary transaction service masquerading as a crypto one) was aggravated when a Ramen vending machine 20 yards away teased cryptocurrency as a purchasing option, only to qualify the payment as “Coming soon!” at checkout.

We went on with our search for BitPay, but it was ultimately fruitless. At the first location, our call on the building’s outside directory went unanswered. At the second, we were told that BitPay no longer occupied space in the building, so we decided to pack it in.

Fighting the wind that had whipped up in our mile or so walk, we took refuge in an Chinese food joint that Dustin was fond of. We split a helping of kung pao chicken, which I repaid in bitcoin. Dustin had become an IRL intermediary through which I could enjoy those elusive dining-in-with-bitcoin experiences.

Dinner finished, we found our way to Stookey’s, an intimate, cooly lit bar that could comfortably seat maybe 30 people. We were fashionably late and took a seat at the rightmost end of the bar. I was unpleasantly unsurprised to discover that no one else had shown up for the meetup yet. For the first 30 minutes, we were the only ones, it seemed, a disappointing situation that was becoming par for the course in a week of almosts.

But it was also a win. I got to spend my bitcoin again, this time on a delicious pisco sour (a Peruvian, egg-white cocktail with a pisco base, bitters and limes) and enough beer and other cocktails to get a buzz on and cringe at the thought that the prices were not too far off from Nashville’s own.

Striking up a conversation with a wispy black-haired guy who “is kinda a tech geek,” Dustin asked him if he was there for the meetup. He said no, admitting that he was a bit skeptical of the whole thing. He rehashed an old misperception that I’ve heard from numerous naysayers, and the fact that I’m forgetting it now is either a testament to the cocktails’ potency or to the fact that most arguments against bitcoin (especially from the underinformed) have all been packaged into a nebulous hodgepodge of complaints that, in their ubiquity, have begun to resemble each other).

Dustin and I hit it off with one of the bartenders, who showed a greater-than-average understanding of crypto — so much so that he had educated opinions on forks, proof of work vs. proof of stake, and Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade. He’s been invested for two-and-a-half years, though he had been tuned into the market and started conducting due diligence two years before that.

I asked if any of the crypto-focused co-owners were around so I could grill them. One of them, a close friend of his, was sojourning in Mexico, as one does when crypto rich. Our bartender was a more-than-adequate stand-in for my questions, seeing as he’d been at the bar for two years, so I asked him if he’d noticed a drop-off in Bitcoin meetup interest.

“They go up and down. We’re in between,” he said, conceding that they had been considering scaling the meetups down from weekly to quarterly.

He also shared his personal experience of the hassles that come with accepting bitcoin, particularly in times of network bloat. “Fees were getting ridiculous on BitPay,” he told me. “A $14 cocktail becomes a $24 cocktail and people don’t want to pay.”

“How many people pay in bitcoin, would you say?” I asked him.

“A few, mostly during the meetups obviously. Every now and then, someone will be a few drinks in, realize we take it and then want to pay that way.”

After about an hour, I turned to my left to observe a room whose patronage had thinned out in tandem with the vanishing contents of our glasses. With the room cleared, I could make out two dudes having an enlivened conversation two seats down from us: one, tall and thin-ish; the other, shorter and bulky, with blond hair.

“I think that’s Dan Held,” I told Dustin, referring to the blond character. True to form, Dustin didn’t seem to know who Dan was, showing the willful introversion of a man who is more preoccupied with the code of the industry over its personalities.

I went over and introduced myself, thanking Dan for an op-ed he had recently submitted to Bitcoin Magazine and telling him a bit about my experiment. I related it back to Kashmir Hill’s own, where he was featured in the final day of her 2014 excursion.

Dan invited me to get coffee the next day, but I said it would be tricky given my schedule. I would be busy in the morning and evening, and I had plans to meet up with cryptograffiti, a San Francisco-based crypto artist, in the afternoon.

He gave a half-cocked smile and nodded to the man he had been talking with.

“No way, seriously?” I said, shocked at the serendipity.

“Yeah, that’s me,” the tall man responded with a grin.

With introductions made, we talked a bit, and I learned (not to any surprise) that the artist was a maximalist of sorts.

“Bitcoin is my baby,” he said with the simultaneous seriousness and self-aware waggishness of a true believer.

Like Dustin, cryptograffiti was an OG. Always jumping at the chance to glean another point of view, I relayed the frustrations that had obstructed my week on bitcoin, and I asked why there were so few people at the meetup.

“People stopped going to meetups because the focus had changed. It was too financial. People started shutting you down if you knew what you were saying,” he said.

It’s all wrapped up in the paradigm shift the crypto community has experienced since 2013, he believes. Like Dustin, he thinks the altcoin boom exposed how mercurial community attention can be and diverted much of the excitement for bitcoin toward the industry’s new and shiny offspring.

“It’s cool to be contrarian. Everyone is looking for the next thing.”

Dustin joined the conversation, along with another meetup latecomer: a short, spiky-haired Ethereum “moon boy” with wide, distant eyes whom I had met at the conference and who claimed he had conceptualized a “decentralized, global supercomputer” in high school before Ethereum had even existed.

Sure thing, bud.

The meetup, while small, felt profound. It was small, but it was also quality and included a diverse sample of the industry’s many players. It was eclectic and intimate, much like the “Bitcoin at $100” meetup that Hill was a part of. Only ours was smaller, something I would not have anticipated when I started this.

But there was probably a greater diversity of professional specializations in the industry at this meetup: a one-man developer team who seemed to personify Bitcoin’s open-source nature, a Texas boy who had become one of the crypto space’s most recognized entrepreneurs, a San Francisco-based DJ-turned-artist whose crypto-themed artwork sells for five figures (yes, really), a Nashville-based journalist who didn’t know squat about Bitcoin until 2017 and was thrilled just to worm his way into this milieu, and the Ethereum moon boy who did brand relations for an Ethereum-built project.

Bitcoin and crypto had all given us the opportunity to pursue passions and careers within the industry.

Even if its use as an IRL payment has regressed, the impact of the network has been far reaching — the industry is more active than ever. This thought enlivened me.

Dustin had offered me a bed on his boat for the night, something I wasn’t about to pass up, especially with a few drinks in me. It was across the way in Berkeley, so we took the BART. I paid Dustin for a ticket and then a 15-minute drive from Oakland put us at the harbor.

The boat’s exterior gave the impression of a modest and relatively well-maintained sailboat. Below deck, the haphazard displacement of various sundries and provisions presented the habitat of a man who probably had the madness to create things few people could.

The night winding down, we decided to watch/play Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch on Netflix. The choose-your-own-adventure movie’s interactive nature gives a new dimension to Black Mirror’s typical rabbit-hole examination of technology and human frailty. We had both watched it before and wanted to see what different endings we could get.

Even if tenuous, the connection between the protagonist’s struggle to create a choose-your-own-adventure game (it’s also glaringly meta, like a lot of Black Mirror’s concepts) in the seminal days of the video game industry and my own struggle to spend bitcoin became apparent.

What alternative endings, universes, paths had I not confronted, found or gone down in the course of my own adventure? Maybe I’d missed some opportunities where I could’ve used my bitcoin. Or maybe this was the most optimal path: I had met Held and cryptograffiti at a meetup and was about to sleep on a boat, owned by a developer whose myriad and disparate interests and lifestyle were like something out of a book.

What other endings are out there? I thought to myself, the boat gently rocking to the bay’s swaying tide.

It was an easy and comfortable sleep.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

This is the fifth instalment of reporter Colin Harper’s “Living on Bitcoin” experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 and on Day 4.

I woke up in a millionaire’s bed today, something I never thought I’d say because I ain’t gonna make a million bucks, and I always doubted I could’ve finagled my way into the bed of someone who had.

Jeremy’s room is your prototypical festival bro living space: Bob Marley poster in one corner, jam band festival posters for Camp Bisco and Gathering of the Vibes (among other music festivals) tacked above a 50-inch, Toshiba plasma screen, which was leaning against the wall and propped up on the box it came in. A tangled cluster of conference passes (many speaker or VIP) hung from a back wall above the felt loveseat.

Below one of the room’s three windows, there’s a bookcase sectioned off into six cubbies, which include Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Lewis, Truman Capote, and some self-help and econ/business books. Almost poetically, a book called Ego is the Enemy appropriately placed in a cubbie diagonally opposite to the one housing Tucker Max’s Assholes Finish First.

On the third floor, I made the coffee I bought at Whole Foods, warmed one of the croissants and did some work.

Over Slack, my colleague Aaron van Wirdum suggested I try a map called Bitcoin Map on the Google Play store to see if it had any bitcoin-accepting places listed that I could be missing. I pulled it up, browsed some places I had previously tried but knew no longer did. Then, I glanced at Haight-Ashbury on the map one last time and noticed a smoke shop and one-time hookah lounge that accepted bitcoin.

On the off chance, I called them up.

“Do you guys still accept bitcoin?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Seriously?!”

“Yes.”

Exuberant, I let a triumphant expletive slip and thanked the woman, assuring her that I would be by later that day.

It would be a smoke shop that becomes the first place where I can spend some bitcoin, I thought to myself.

With that victory, my spirits were lifted and I began to make preparations for my day. Needing to get more credit for Uber, I tried out Gyft, a gift card purchasing platform that made Hill’s second run at this in 2014 so much easier. Vinny Lingham started it, and the platform accepts other forms of payment than just bitcoin.

I couldn’t use it though. I tried to buy an Uber gift card, but my Samourai wallet wouldn’t accept the BitPay QR as valid (which, given Samourai’s general crypto maximalism, made sense and also seemed to sum up the difficulties of the experiment to that point). I opted for Bitrefill again.

Then I started doing some research on Kraken and Coinbase’s locations in San Francisco. According to Google, they have the same office address, which I found odd.

Putting the address into my Uber app, I decided to make my way to the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District to see if I could pester my way into either or both offices. “Just show up and ask to talk to people,” Hill’s advice echoed in my head.

The addresses I got on Google led me to a mailing address, but then a bit of sleuthing got me addresses (supposedly) of the actual offices for both Kraken and Coinbase. Kraken’s, though, turned out to be a FedEx, which led me to think that my informant was screwing with me or that Kraken had registered that address intentionally so as to not be bothered.

Coinbase’s office was right, so I cut the informant some slack. I secured a receptionist’s number from the security desk in the lobby but didn’t really have time to make an appointment for later. This wasn’t 2013 anymore: I couldn’t just drop in on their three employees in an apartment office anymore. This was 2019 and Coinbase had become a unicorn with more than 500 employees and six offices in three countries.

The rain was light but steady when I was searching for Kraken and Coinbase’s offices, but it would come down progressively harder the longer I walked. I passed a Target on my route in which I could have bought an umbrella (Paxful and Gyft have Target cards), and it highlighted a problem with banking on bitcoin through gift cards. You have to preplan your purchases, or else you have to stop, connect to wifi, and use an exchange that takes bitcoin to buy new cards before you can redeem them.

It seems obvious, but it’s not as seamless as cash, debit or credit. Even so, there aren’t so many hoops to jump through — just enough to make doing so outside in the rain an inconvenience.

My denim jacket was thoroughly soaked, so I stopped inside a Starbucks and ordered a coffee with a Starbucks gift card I bought on Paxful. I ordered a seasonal latte, basic white boy that I am, but I had the barista only pump about a third of the usual flavor shots into it because I don’t like drinking syrup.

While downtown, I visited Quantstamp’s offices, as Christian had set me up with a buddy of his who worked there, Jared let me in and we talked crypto. He mentioned a bubble tea cafe nearby that used to accept crypto, but it proved to be yet another red herring, making me worry that maybe the smoke shop on Haight might not either.

Ubering back to the castle, I sent some additional funds to my Samourai wallet ahead of my trip to the shop. Rachel wanted to come along, partly I think for the fun of it but also because she was fiending for some Juul pods and was banking on my generosity to secure her some.

We reached the smoke shop shortly before close as one employee was busy allocating merch to a back closet. It was what you expected from a smoke shop: pieces, bongs and actual tobacco pipes in various sizes and in a motley of translucent, glass-infused colors. They sell smokes and vaping supplies too, but no Juuls or Juul pods (to Rachel’s great dismay).

Approaching the counter, I try to confirm what I’d been told over the phone.

“Y’all take bitcoin, right?”

“Bitcoin? Yes, I think,” said the middle-aged, Asian woman, hesitantly. “We used to at least. Ask him,” she says, pointing to the man stacking the backroom with inventory.

Her husband, a middle-aged, white guy with glasses, a mariner’s cap and close-shaven beard, who looks like he might read communist theory and know his way around a VPN, dashed my bitcoin-spending hopes with his answer.

“I don’t think so. Honey, do we still have the payment processor?” he asked.

They didn’t. Snapcard, which may have very well been the same defunct-processor that Woot Bear used, was no longer in service, so they stopped taking it some time ago. They had originally decided to start accepting bitcoin in 2013-2014 when it was “cool” to do so, and the husband was kicking himself for not doing it sooner.

“People would want to come in and buy rolling papers and we didn’t want to take it, which was stupid,” he chuckled.

I asked if they still had a Coinbase account to which I could send bitcoin, but the wife said that her son held the account and they didn’t know how to use it. After a few more failed attempts at trying to find a solution, I gave up, thanked them and left the shop.

As I left, I was convinced there was some grand conspiracy to keep me from spending bitcoin, until the woman peeked her head out of the shop to beckon us back.

“I think we figured it out,” she said.

Eager and a bit antsy, I leaned over the counter to observe her Coinbase app while I tried for the items I had picked out (a glass piece that’s totally not for me and white sage for the castle). As it turned out, they weren’t verified with Coinbase, so they could only buy/sell on Coinbase and not send/receive. This annoyed me: Why do one when you can’t do the other?

“It’s ok,” I said, resigned at this point.

But the woman insisted. She was nice enough to let me just scan the QR code for her son’s wallet, and she even gave me a five buck discount on the piece.

Effusive, I thanked them and asked for their names, which they prefered I not publish here. Apparently, San Francisco is not too friendly to tobacco shops.

“The city is trying to annex the smoke shops,” the husband told me. That coupled with the stigma of bitcoin and the illicit drug market’s symbiotic dependence on the dark web (and the fact that the business is basically a head shop) made them wary enough of potentially damaging publicity.

The fact that the transaction almost happened then didn’t, only to almost not happen and then succeed was representative of how the experiment has been panning out so far. The bitcoin PoS was makeshift, but it finally happened, and I was happy enough to finally get the first IRL transaction out of the way, even if it came on day five. It was also directly peer-to-peer — no middleman payment processor involved, which I liked.

Finally, something to write home about.

Returning to the castle, I would spend the rest of the night fraternizing with the residents who were quickly becoming acquaintances and friends. They all had their own goals and projects, and the interactions in my short time with them will be worth a story one day.

There’s Rachel, who’s known Jeremy since 2015; Liz, the Queen of the Castle (obviously); Michael, a laid back relations or community manager who “kinda does crypto but not really;” Orest and Aymard, who work at Ausum Ventures with Jeremy; Teddy and Hans, who are building a blockchain query database for legal documents; Vivian, the VP of the same self-driving car startup, comma.ai, that used to reside in the castle’s basement; and a prodigious, 18-year-old developer-entrepreneur who runs his own AI financial consultation startup and whom Jeremy referred to once as his “protégé.”

“So, are you like the wunderkind developer prodigy of the house?” I asked him.

“Pretty much. But it’s not just that.”

“What, like you’re also the wunderkind entrepreneurial prodigy?”

“Something like that,” he responded with a smile and honest innocence.

He told me he would rather not be identified in the article because the banks and other businesses he works with don’t know that he’s still a kid, he confessed. That he had operated so long without them finding out was astounding to me.

The Prodigy began his company when he was a freshman in high school. No, not college (he never took that road), high school. In the company’s early stages, he decided to go all in on his vision.

“So I pretty much left high school.”

No diploma or degree to speak of, he moved to San Francisco when he was 15. In what would have been his sophomore year, he was focused on driving business growth while his peers were testing for learner’s permits.

An early investor in Ethereum and a sometimes crypto-head, he met Jeremy at a crypto castle party in 2017, and Jeremy would take him under his wing and offer him a home.

Now he works out of the community surrounded by the advice and the tutelage of the castle’s residents, who, while still young entrepreneurs themselves, have plenty of experience and tips to impart to the kid.

I highlighted The Prodigy here because or his age and precociousness but also because the whiz-tech kid who eschews education in favor of just doing makes for a pretty good story. Realistically, I could have profiled some of the other residents and their endeavors as well (for instance, I plan on doing an article on some of the innovative, impactful startups Ausum Ventures has invested in).

But The Prodigy particularly personified the house’s ethos: driven, focused, entrepreneurial and hardworking.

“Do you do drugs or drink?” I asked him.

“No. Never.”

“Good. Don’t,” I advised him.

Truth is, considering the portrait of the millionaire party boy that has been painted of Jeremy in the past, the castle was nothing like that. It wasn’t like the mainstream coverage would imply: no end-to-end daily benders or booze-infused ragers. I don’t think anyone even touched a drink while I was there. Everyone was busy working. As Rachel would tell me, “No one drinks here. They all have shit to do.”

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

I woke up in a state of amazement: In my three days of living on bitcoin, I had managed to survive on a handful of services and the generosity of friends.

Hungry for any place that would let me spend it, I was more determined than ever to call up every single store in the Bay Area that might accept bitcoin. A few, like Bamboo Asia and Ramen Underground, were closed yesterday, so I still had a small, if shrinking, beacon of light at the end of a tunnel of rejection.

Most places weren’t open yet, so I had a call with my editor, who was keen to hear about how it had been both too simple and hopelessly difficult.

“Well hey, there’s the angle,” she suggested.

It was an angle, but it was also a dead end of sorts. I needed to find someplace to finally spend my bitcoin to make my day-to-day purchases different for a change (though going shop-to-shop in unsuccessful attempts to spend it and acting like a hungry lunatic on Haight street could also be considered “something different”).

A bit of work, a bit of coffee, a bit of social media trumpeting and it’s 11:00 a.m. Excited by the prospect of hopefully going out for lunch for once this week, I called up Bamboo Asia first.

“Hello, is this Bamboo Asia?”

“Yes it is,” a woman responded over the phone.

“Do y’all still accept bitcoin?”

“What?”

“Do you still take bitcoin?”

“Bit … coin?” she stuttered, a bit confused.

“I take that as a no, then?”

“No.”

“Okay, thank you,” I hung up.

Strike one.

Next up: Ramen Underground:

“Yes, hello, do you take bitcoin?”

“Bit what?”

“Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency.”

“Oh. No.”

Strike 2.

Then, I dialed Numa, a sushi joint that had slipped through yesterday’s round of solicitations:

“Do you accept bitcoin?”

“Do we have corn?”

Uh, no.

“No, no, do you take bitcoin — as a method for payment?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is,” she said hesitantly.

“It’s internet money. It —”

“Oh, no, no, no — no, not that, sorry.” She quickly cut me off.

Strike 3.

Well, in reality, there were many more strikes than that. I even called Siegel’s Clothing Superstore and Tuxedo, just for hell of it.

Over the phone, the question like an incessant recording (at this point, everytime I ask, I close my eyes and squinch my face up in embarrassed anticipation for the answer).

“I — I don’t think so, but let me check — can you hold on a minute?”

“Absolutely,” I answer, excited at the prospect of potentially something to go on.

“For the current sale, I’m sorry, no, they don’t accept bitcoin. No Apple Pay. Just Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and, of course, U.S. cash.”

Yep, I expected as much.

There was one last hope, but I was beginning to doubt that even Stookey’s, a bar I’d been told takes bitcoin by someone other than Google, would take it. If all else fails, maybe I’ll get to spend it there — eventually.

As night rolled around, I got ready to transition to the Crypto Castle. Queen Liz had granted me two night’s stay: On Tuesday, I’d be on the couches upstairs, but for Monday, I’d be sleeping in Jeremy’s room.

Oh. Ok.

The gesture took me aback for a second but it made sense for the bohemian-tech aesthetic that the house has going for it. That I would sleep in a millionaire’s bed one night and then a couch the next was humorous and exotic in a very benign way to me.

It was a short walk from Christian’s apartment, only half a mile, but distance can be deceiving when San Francisco’s hills tack on a couple hundred feet of elevation gain. Lugging my belongings in a 50-gallon hiking backpack, my daypack slung over my right shoulder, I schlepped myself up the hills that were sloping at a crazy 45 degrees.

I was partially heaving when I topped the hill, turned right on Kansas Street and stopped in front of the castle’s telltale blue door with a “Bitcoin Prefered Here” sticker in the window. I pressed the buzzer.

“Yes, who is it?”

“Colin — the Bitcoin journalist,” I responded, and soon heard the door’s unlatching click.

Hans, an Italian expat developer with a machine-learning background who’s relatively new to the space, let me in. He has rich olive skin and curly black hair, and an apprehensive but affable personality.

We walked over to Jeremy’s room as Hans recapped some of what Liz had told me.

“I’m finishing up some work right now, do you mind?” he asked as we entered the room. Apparently, Jeremy’s room is a free-for-all space; he would likely have it no other way.

“Of course not — work away,” I told him. I mean, it’s not really my place to dictate what he can and can’t do in a room that isn’t mine to begin with.

The in-and-out style of the house’s residents made for some brisk but pleasant introductions. I would meet Teddy, a tall, lanky and balding Ethereum-to-EOS developer who works with Hans. He’s a bit jumpy and is into Soylent (and keeps offering me some to drink). Diego, another developer who used to play soccer at Boston College, would also come through with Kingsley, an Australian venture capitalist.

I posted up upstairs and did some work, shot the bull with Crypto Castle denizens and made plans for the rest of the week. I also reviewed Kashmir Hill’s 2014 living on bitcoin series. She had held on to some of her coins (she had a few left) and they had appreciated in value from 2013 to 2014.

Her second series is even more entertaining than the first. With her bitcoins’ increased purchasing power, she could access more exotic experiences: She spends it on winery tours, a nice (boy, I mean nice) dinner and even a riotous strip club experience.

Reading her accounts, I feel a wave of envy and the sense of a missed opportunity. She had so many more ways to spend her bitcoin; in reality, five years later, my bitcoin doesn’t have the same reach and San Francisco has basically zero merchant presence. Even if I had 2–3 bitcoin like her at the time of this experiment, I wouldn’t have a way to spend it (unless I wanted to drop it on bottles at Monarch, but that’s not really my scene).

Toward the end of the day, the reality that I hadn’t had one, in-person exchange with a merchant of any kind deeply depressed me.

Why the hell am I even doing this, and why I am spending so much money here?

I could be doing this anywhere. I could be doing this back home. Even there — in little ol’ Nashville with its tinkertoy tech scene — I could have at least bought dinner at Flyte, the only restaurant in town to accept BTC. But it’s a pricey dine, so by the time the week was up I would have been out a month’s rent (or a week’s rent in San Francisco).

Dinnertime approaching, I decided to use a Whole Foods gift card to stock up on provisions. It was a five-minute walk from the castle, and Kashmir had used gift cards she purchased from Gyft on her second go-around, so I thought it was permissible to buy one off of Bitrefill myself.

At least I could tear into the San Francisco Whole Foods’ hot and cold takeaway bars, an unmatched cornucopia of grocery store self-serves. Turkey pot pie, steak fries, tabouli, butternut squash, kale salad, chicken salad, couscous, shrimp, croquettes, yams, all crammed into the brown to-go box. I also got some Peet’s coffee and almond croissants for the house (should have gone for whole bean because of course this house would also have a grinder).

While the young woman at the counter dealt with the somewhat clunky process of redeeming my gift card — after I’d had to go through the even clunkier process of buying bitcoin before buying said gift card before being able to buy the groceries in store — something Hill observes in her article resonated with me.

The process was more time consuming and labor intensive than paying in fiat, but it was also liberating in its own way.

Bitcoin had provided me the opportunity to purchase those groceries, just as it had allowed me to buy all my Uber Eats food up till now. The merchant/drivers didn’t know where the credit came from, nor where or how it was bought.

For Uber, KYC is a given. But with gift cards, you can use bitcoin to transact in near complete anonymity. You can bank like a ghost if you want, and you can buy most everything you need without leaving a trail of credit or debit. Like cash, bitcoin can be used as an anonymous transfer of value — you just need to transmute it into a different payment method for real-world use first. If you want to increase your anonymity, you can take steps to mask your network activity. (e.g., I started using the privacy-focused Samourai wallet on the fourth day after my BRD wallet became too unreliable).

With these thoughts, I returned home (unfortunately, uphill again). After hanging with the castle’s crew and eating my meal, I took my rest in the bed of a guy who probably didn’t even know I was sleeping there but would doubtless not care.

This is the third instalment of reporter Colin Harper’s “Living on Bitcoin” experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 and on Day 2.

I woke up on day 3 and made a pact with myself: I had resolved to not rely on Uber Eats that day.

I still think that buying this credit from an exchange like Bitrefill or Paxful is in line with the experiment, but I haven’t made a PoS purchase yet and I want to make today about going out and actually using bitcoin with merchants.

Only once I ventured out to actually try this did I realize that the trend I unearthed yesterday would become an insurmountable obstacle.

I woke up in a bed this time (one had been freed up after Christian’s roommate and friends left to move to LA). Like the day before, I immediately hit the coffee and continued to work on the write-up of the previous day. Little of note happened. Christian left to go back to Nashville to then go to Miami for a conference. Riggins, who had slept on the couch the night before, went with him.

To prep for a day of no Uber Eats, I looked up some of the places that I hadn’t checked with yet to see if they still took bitcoin. The preliminary results were disheartening. Bamboo Asian and Ramen Underground are closed on Sundays. Three Babes Bakery no longer accepts crypto and neither does Elixart, even though their Nevada location does. So my prospects here in San Francisco were looking grim.

Surely somewhere, I thought.

Resolved to make something of the day, I decide that I should just throw myself out there and see if I could stumble upon a place that would take BTC. If all the online bitcoin-as-payment finders had it wrong, maybe there were a few stores that did accept it but weren’t listed.

Clinging to this hope, I ordered an Uber for Haight-Ashbury, starting off my search with a toy shop called Woot Bear that supposedly accepted bitcoin. I wasn’t holding my breath.

An Uber pool took me a block away from Woot Bear and Haight street. Walking that way, I took out a sign I had prepped for my promenade in San Francisco’s hippie district.

“If you buy me food or coffee, I’ll send you bitcoin. I’ll help you set up a wallet and be your friend!”

I figured the absurd gesture would be in character for Haight-Ashbury’s rabble of itinerants, tourists, burnouts and homeless population. People probably thought the sign was asking for handouts. It wouldn’t be the first time I would be mistaken for homeless (happened earlier this year while passing out Thanksgiving meals around Nashville).

Woot Bear’s caretaker was out for lunch, so I walked around, sign in front, and went searching for food (I hadn’t eaten yet) or any place that would take my coins. I didn’t expect to waltz into a place and find that they take bitcoin, no more than I expected someone to take my sign seriously. Still worth the attempt. The reactions themselves when I asked were worth it.

Finding a thrift store I visited last time I was in San Francisco, I went in and glanced at a few shirts. A tall woman with jet black hair was preoccupied with her phone behind the cashier’s desk.

After browsing some flannels, I walked up to ask a question I already knew the answer to.

“Yes?” she asked, a little annoyed, looking up from the phone after I had loomed over the desk for a few seconds.

“What are the chances you could be swayed to accept bitcoin?”

Lips pursed on a to-go drink straw, she slowly shook a lowered head.

“No.”

“Yeah, I expected as much,” I said resignedly.

A little farther down the strip, I walked into a run-of-the-mill smoke shop. I asked the dude working it if they accept bitcoin.

He just shook his head.

“Know of any places around Haight that do,” I asked, grasping at anything I could get.

“Nope. Cash is king here.”

Cash is king, I thought. Yeah, no kidding, bucko. What’d you expect?

I slipped into probably half a dozen more shops, receiving the same result and a mixture of reactions. One young, nose-studded barista looked like I had offended her with my question, another was simply amused and gave me a free coffee. Most young dudes that I asked would just laugh at the question, answering, “No, sorry!” with a grin. The majority of people were simply confused. Some probably didn’t know what it was, but they knew that they didn’t accept it.

A bit defeated, I went back to Woot Bear. Now that it was open, I asked the shopkeeper if they still accept bitcoin.

“Bitcoin?” she asked, pausing her phone conversation for a moment. “Oh, no, I’m sorry we don’t anymore.”

I expected as much — past results were becoming indicative of future ones.

I asked her why they’d stopped. She told me that, apparently, the payment processor they used was no longer operational.

Still, she went on to sing bitcoin’s praises emphatically to the fellow who was still on the other end of her phone call.

“Bitcoin was great!” she told him. “It was fee-less and it would automatically convert to money in your bank account.”

She was treating it like some arcane truth, stammering while explaining how they used to use it and the value it carried.

“I don’t know what it is,” she ultimately confessed.

Phone calls, store visits, solicitations, holding that sign like a lunatic. Nothing would bring me the opportunity to spend bitcoin.

I left Woot Bear — the coincidental significance of its name including “bear” only now starting to register — with my confidence in disrepair. Still, I tried a few more shops to no avail and had an encounter that I won’t recount here for fear of being put on an FBI watch list.

Stopping to record what just happened (and clueing my buddies in — we have a running tally on surreal encounters), I was interrupted by an older, flustered, Indian man.

“Is that you?” he asked, pointing to my sign as it rested on the shop’s sandwich-board sign.

Thinking he was interested in my sign (he was the first person to stop to read it), I enthusiastically replied in the affirmative.

“Well, stop it. This is my sign, my shop.” The man gestured at the storefront.

“Oh, sorry, I was just typing something up — just using your sign for a second.”

“Okay, I don’t care if you need it for a minute,” he said as he stepped farther out on the sidewalk, seemingly to monitor my loitering.

Walking to the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, I was resigned to not finding anywhere on Haight that would take bitcoin, but not to finding nowhere that would take it.

Posted up on a bench outside a public basketball court, I called up a few places I had left to check with.

Nothing.

They’d all stopped taking bitcoin some time ago. A tone of brisk agitation usually followed my questions.

Frustrated, I gave up. The constant Google queries, calls and typing — all my activity had been eating into my phone’s battery — with hunger eating at my concentration: I’d had enough. My phone was at 5 percent, so I called an Uber and retreated to the apartment.

I’m typing this in the Uber and it’s honestly hard to focus with this empty burning in my gut.

San Francisco’s roller coaster landscape didn’t help. Most of what I wrote in the Uber was crap.

Back at the apartment, I ordered Curry Up Now again. The deconstructed samosas and sexy fries were very much a transcendent experience, probably both because they were undeniably delicious and because my stomach was ready to turn in on itself.

I was fed, but I wasn’t satisfied. My pact was broken: I couldn’t use bitcoin in any stores or restaurants, and the reality was becoming very clear that I likely wouldn’t get the chance.

I wasn’t thriving like I would have hoped — or really expected. Sure, saying I’ve been surviving wouldn’t be quite right, because it’s been unequivocally easy to use Bitrefill to get more Uber credit. But there’s no diversity in purchases, just travel and food. Not only have I not been able to spend it in the city, but I haven’t been able to experience the different ways that I could spend it.

Frustrated and disappointed, I watched the Saints play (and beat) the Eagles in the NFC division round and wrote a little more. Another night of being fed by a friend, as Michelle cooked risotto and had her folks over.

Before dinner was served, I heard Michelle talk about the experiment with them. Her mother took to the topic with quick fascination but diagnosed the potential difficulties with it.

“Oh, that’s going to be tough, but if he can do it anywhere, it would be here,” her mom said.

Let me tell ya, lady — you have no idea.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN