This guy traveled around the world for a year with 1 Bitcoin, and even met Vitalik Buterin and John McAfee

Source: breakermag

Compiled by: Carol

Produced by: Blockchain Camp (blockchain_camp)

Editor's note: The original title was "This guy used 1 Bitcoin to travel around the world for a year. Not only did he meet Vitalik Buterin and John McAfee, he also used Bitcoin to go to a strip club..."

If you were given one bitcoin and asked to travel around the world, what would you do?

At the end of August 2017, RR Hauxley, an architect in Portland, Oregon, USA, bought one Bitcoin for just over $4,700.

On September 1, 2017, he began a year-long journey, visiting 20 countries in total, from China to Ethiopia to Denmark, just to spend this one Bitcoin .

Huxley, 31, recently spoke with CoinDesk about everything from his chance encounters with Vitalik Buterin and John McAfee to his visit to a pro-Bitcoin club in Bangkok.

Next, let us follow his description and take a look at this unique “Bitcoin Tour Around the World”.

When Huxley first started traveling, he was still relatively new to Bitcoin and blockchain. What made him so excited that he decided to spend one Bitcoin in a year by overturning his lifestyle?

Huxley told reporters that before this, he had actually been belittling and denying Bitcoin. He first heard about Bitcoin in 2010, when a programmer bought two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoins, so Huxley was more certain that Bitcoin would disappear due to government regulation and crackdowns, especially after the collapse of the Silk Road.

Later, the founder of the Mt.Gox claims group resigned and sold his bitcoins for $600 each. "I thought this was the direction of Bitcoin. But later I was surprised that Bitcoin didn't die." Huxley said.

Huxley

It wasn’t until 2017, when Huxley heard about Bitcoin again from the news and friends, that he said to himself, “ It’s not dead yet, there must be a reason why it’s not dead, I’m going to investigate. ” So Huxley went to a conference in Portland and talked to the people who were there. Here, he not only found experts in the field, but also met a group of people he thought were the most interesting.

Huxley felt that these people challenged his worldview in many ways. In every subsequent meeting he attended, he was very happy to find that from Hong Kong, China to Myanmar, to India, to Ethiopia, there were always one or two smart, insightful, and challenging people. This is also part of the reason that inspired him to travel around the world with Bitcoin.

One Bitcoin used for one year

If nothing unexpected happens, Huxley originally intended to use one Bitcoin for a full year, or 365 days - if his luggage had not been stolen that day.

At the end of the trip, Huxley was caught off guard in a hotel and his belongings were stolen. So technically, he ended the trip five days before the 365 days of the year. Huxley said that this was one of the moments when he wanted to give up the most - although there were such moments during the year-long journey. "Although it was not a full 365 days, I could complete this thing reasonably - I decided to do a fasting for the remaining days, lying on the sofa and doing nothing until the 365-day target was completed." What a clever little ghost.

This experiment did not require Huxley to use only Bitcoin for consumption. He knows that some people try to live on Bitcoin alone when traveling, and they will find some places that accept this cryptocurrency for food, clothing, housing and transportation. But after investigation, he found that this is unrealistic. So during the trip, he will go to any place where he can spend Bitcoin directly, and try to use Bitcoin to solve daily life problems during the trip, but Bitcoin is not the only way to pay directly.

Huxley said that it was easiest to realize this idea in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. In order to ensure that Bitcoin could be used smoothly during the trip, he first found some craft beers or hotels that accepted cryptocurrencies. Throughout the trip, he was actively looking for places where he could use these currencies directly.

Stores that accept Bitcoin payments in Hong Kong, China

The second method is to use BitPay , but this payment method was disabled on January 5, 2018 (US time), which means it will be invalid in the first few months of travel.

The third method is to use LocalBitcoins to trade Bitcoin for local fiat currency wherever Huxley is in the world. Part of this experiment is to test its price volatility.

Huxley knew that if he traveled around the world with just one Bitcoin, it would be a journey full of drama and adventure as the price rose and fell.

A craft beer bar that accepts cryptocurrencies in Shenzhen, Guangdong: http://bionicbrew.com/

“My friends and family told me I was crazy.”

Huxley started this "Bitcoin journey" in September 2017. As we all know, Bitcoin began to rise continuously at the end of 2017 and reached the peak of the market, which greatly helped Huxley, who originally tried to travel around the world with Bitcoin worth $5,000 per coin.

"My friends and my wife told me I was crazy," Huxley said with a laugh.

“Because I was trying to travel the world with $5,000, and most of them thought Bitcoin was a bubble that would soon burst, and then who knows what would happen? So no one would really support me.”

Huxley said his parents are not very rich, so even if he encounters any problems on this trip, his parents can't help him out. "So I'm likely to be stranded somewhere, which is really a scary thought. But it's also a very interesting experiment." Huxley said.

But what happened next was a climax for Huxley. As the price of Bitcoin continued to rise in December 2017, he began to eat good burgers and drink a beer on the way. At that time, John McAfee was hyping on social media that Bitcoin would rise to $500,000 per coin (by 2020) or he would eat his a** (automatically muted).

“If he risks his heirlooms, Bitcoin will continue to rise,” Huxley muttered to himself at the time.

“Of course, some people think that Bitcoin will always appreciate in value so they choose to hold it. But I spent more than a year studying Bitcoin and used it to travel.”

The surge in Bitcoin prices gave Huxley a good time, but what happened to the journey afterwards?

"Then?...Then, then it collapsed." Huxley laughed, as if this was not something he had experienced.

" The price of Bitcoin plummeted shortly after it soared, but my trip wasn't over yet, so I started using my travel tricks again - couch surfing or hitchhiking. "

Meet the godfather of antivirus software and the founder of Ethereum during the trip

During this special trip, Huxley also met "antivirus software godfather" John McAfee and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

It has to be said that both of them are legends in the technology world. John McPhee, known as the "No. 1 Internet Celebrity in the Cryptocurrency Circle", once tweeted that he did not like Ethereum because... Vitalik was too rustic and too skinny to be malnourished. Although Vitalik, as a young man born in 1994, certainly would not care about McPhee's complaints, in everyone's opinion, the two are not the same kind of great people.

Huxley told us that he is very grateful to John McPhee and Vitalik because they both opened his eyes in different ways. Huxley met Vitalik when he was in Shenzhen, China, when Vitalik was a keynote speaker at a conference and was talking about CasperLabs and how it works. Later, Huxley managed to have an interview with Vitalik in person, and in his own words, "Vitalik opened my eyes in many ways."

“He was really smart because he was very eloquent in answering my questions, but at the same time, I could tell he was thinking about a lot of different things that were much more important than me,” Huxley said.

“And how he combined his intelligence and passion for his project, Ethereum, made me see lasting momentum for Ethereum and cryptocurrencies.”

Huxley also said that even though there are rumors that Vitalik will withdraw from the Ethereum project, he does not think Vitalik will abandon the project.

“Whether the price goes up, down or sideways, he (Vtd) just doesn’t care about the price.”

Huxley and Vitalik Buterin in Shenzhen

As for McAfee, Huxley said he was just as incredible as he imagined.

Huxley and McAfee had a whiskey and coke. The hot topic at the time was bitcoin mining and how it affected the environment, and some in the media said it should be banned . Huxley had always thought that McAfee was most likely leading a large bitcoin mine in some remote mountain area in the northwest, so he asked McAfee a soul-searching question on the topic of bitcoin mining: What do you think?

McAfee told Huxley that he would continue to mine Bitcoin until the last polar bear drowned.

"That's really an exaggeration," Huxley concluded after listening to it.

" But he opened my eyes from another perspective, the perspective of a promoter and an evangelist, " Huxley said. "John McAfee is a savvy guy, but he's also a person who really likes the media and the attention. He would choose to become a media consultant and say outrageous things to get attention," Huxley said.

Huxley and John McAfee

We are planning to make this trip into a documentary

Huxley told CoinDesk he plans to make a documentary about his trip, which took him through bitcoin’s dizzying late-2017-early-2018 bull run (and subsequent crash) , or even a series because there’s so much material.

Trailer for Huxley’s Bitcoin Travel Documentary

Perhaps too many people wanted to see this wonderful movie, and many people launched donations to support Huxley in releasing the movie, but because he still had to work and watch all the shots himself, the release date had to be postponed.

Huxley said that many crazy and outrageous things happened during this adventure that will be turned into a movie, but some situations could not be recorded with a camera.

For example, when Huxley was in Bangkok, he found a bar that accepted Bitcoin payments, but after entering, he discovered that it was a strip club, with people performing naked shows such as table tennis on the stage. What surprised him the most was that when he looked around for how to pay with Bitcoin, he found that there were QR codes tattooed on the thighs of the strippers, and customers could tip them in this way. One supported Bitcoin, and the other supported Bitcoin Cash . He was also drunk.

Full trailer for Huxley’s Bitcoin travel documentary : https://youtu.be/gjacVPEaCW8

If someone wants to travel around the world with Bitcoin

Do you have any suggestions?

"If I also have a Bitcoin and want to travel around the world, what advice do you have for me? How should I optimize my Bitcoin?" The reporter asked a question that everyone wants to know.

“Then travel hack,” Huxley said. “I would say have fun and try it out, because that’s what I did. I loved experimenting with LocalBitcoins, finding people to trade with, wondering if it would go through or if I would get robbed. I also used Couchsurfing.com a lot. Hitchhiking can still be a little scary sometimes, but it provided great material for my book.”

Halix has a book about his adventures, titled Stolen Wallets and Where to Buy Them, out this summer.

When asked, “ Would you ever travel around the world with a bitcoin again? ” Huxley immediately responded, “ Never again. ”

"It was incredibly annoying, honestly," Huxley recalls of the trip, " because I can count on one hand the number of times I've stayed in a decent hotel. When you're on a budget like I am, the risk of getting into trouble with diseases and bugs goes up a lot. Of course, I also make an effort to prevent these things from happening."

"What I'm saying is that if a bitcoin is worth $500,000, as John McAfee said, then you can certainly choose to travel this way. Because it's a completely different travel experience and a different game, " Huxley said.

Source: Babbitt