I Survived on Bitcoin for 14 Days | Cointelegraph Documentary

Here we are at the gas station. Let's go see if they actually take bitcoin here. Excuse me, quick question. Do you guys accept bitcoin? No. No. Do we take bitcoin? Bitcoin? No. No. Have you heard of Bitcoin? Okay. I'm doing a survey about Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets mark the frontier of the technological world. They are the wild west of the Internet. Loosely regulated, highly volatile entities that may well become the future of global currencies in as little as a decade. But can they be used to lead a sustainable lifestyle? Is it possible to live solely off of Bitcoin in 2019? In essence, what does it take to go fully digital? I have made one rule for myself to follow. Every purchase that I make has to be made with Bitcoin. With a rule that simple, how hard can this challenge really be? First things first, we're going to set up a Bitcoin wallet. After a little research, I decided to create a Coinbase account. Since I didn't have much prior experience with crypto, it seems like one of the simplest, safest and easiest platforms to use. Number two, we are going to find out if we can buy some food. I mean, we're in New York City. There's gotta be somewhere in New York City that accepts Bitcoin. There will be somewhere. There has to be. There has to be. There has to be. There has to be. There has to be. I've looked online to see where the places are that like on Yelp, they give you a list. And I called almost everyone on the list and almost everyone on the list didn't accept me to call me. Oh my God. Why are they even on that list exactly? I don't know. I don't even survive here. I was living in New York, the financial and food capital of the world. No food delivery service, no direct access, no third party retailers, nothing. I was just utterly baffled. I mean, how could this be possible? I decided to talk to a couple of my crypto savvy friends to find out. As a scalability issue, which, which means that when a lot of people are using the network, the network slows down and becomes incredibly expensive to use and doesn't work properly. It doesn't function as it's supposed to. So all these different networks need to solve the scalability problem if they want to really have a lot of throughput, a lot of transactions happening at the same time. Right? Now, if you were to tell me Bitcoin was going to have the same amount of transactions or needed to support the same amount of transactions as Visa. It wouldn't be feasible. Yeah, it'd be too expensive to transact. It'd be too slow. You can't wait five minutes to buy something. You can't sit there and be like, you can't. Yeah, you can't. You get those 16 confirmations yet? Yeah, they have, like, the bitcoin, like, waiting area over the side, and everyone's just crowded there. Your transaction is complete. Number 135. I can leave 135? Yes. Yes. Surprisingly enough, living in a densely populated metropolitan area like New York City does not actually translate into more bitcoin options. There are only a handful of restaurants in New York that actually directly accept bitcoin. Of that handful, three of those restaurants are actually owned by the same French chef. So I'm at the La Serine right now, as you can see. I came in and all I did was I just mentioned that I was going to pay with cryptocurrency, and the waiter went and got the chef. Chef came out, he gave me this nice beer here, and he told me all about his. Do you think that cryptocurrencies will totally replace fiat currencies? It will, but not now.

But it will, definitely. Now we're talking about 30 years.

30 years?

Yes, 30.

So every. Everything is going to be a total, like global re. Currency revolution in the next 30 years.

Not saying it cannot be a little messy, of course, but definitely crypto will replace that. It's safer and you can track if you want cash. That means if you don't want to accept your cryptocurrency because you want to be anonymous, it's your problem.

So what. What do you think is the biggest obstacle for bitcoin in the future?

The big obstacle in the future? I think it's the lobbies, of course. Federal Reserve, some banks. I'm not saying, well, because Chase is bad, but they invest heavily, you know, and much more. The problem, the energy they have to resolve the energy. That's a future problem. That's the only obstacle I can see. That doesn't mean it will put the bitcoin totally down. No, it's just not mo. That much, that's all. And then find the solution.

Okay, so here I am, I'm about to pay for my meal with bitcoin. They have the iPad or the tablet, and I've got my phone here, and I'm going to scan. There we go. And so that pulls it up. And I'm going to send confirm. And that's that. So now we have this. It's. It's pending. And that is the process right there. So that will go through. Paid. Excellent. Look at that. How cool is that, right? Yeah. I just paid at a restaurant with bitcoin. That's it. As cool as that may be, eating at a French bistro three times a day obviously isn't a sustainable option. And given my inability to purchase groceries with bitcoin, I began looking for alternative options. My backup option is to go on egifter. It was one of the retailers that is known to take bitcoin. And I'm going to see if I can buy some sort of gift card that will let me purchase dinner. Tonight, we are going to open up Egifter Buy with Bitcoin. Here. Right here. We're here with the crypto and they're like, come on, give it to us. We want the crypto. I'm sure that all of you bright, smart, intelligent people watching this video can clearly see the limitations of Egifter. Do I just eat Chipotle every night? Do I just get two? Do I just save $10 and eat chipotle every night? It sounds disgusting, but, I mean, not exactly the broadest range of views, right? Thankfully, I was going to have some time to ponder these issues without the anxiety of actually having to deal with them. Here we are in the airport. Fortunately, there was a Dunkin Donuts here and I still had some money left in the gift card that I. That I bought earlier with bitcoin. I was headed down to Florida for a quick visit with my family and more importantly, to try to explain bitcoin to my grandfather. But at least I wasn't going to have to pay for any meals. Oh, there aren't a lot of places that have bitcoin. Correct. What do you know about bitcoin? Not very much. I try to stay away from it as much as possible. And here I had the brilliant idea of getting my dad to try to explain bitcoin to my grandfather. Not only would I get to see what my father had learned, I would also get to see what my grandfather thought about this little project. I would not consider myself to be an expert or even especially knowledgeable about it, but what little I know is that this is a new type of currency that's not connected to any sovereign state. With Bitcoin, there is no bank involved. The. The transaction is only between you. It's between you and me directly. So there's no way for a bank to control or even know about what the transaction, what we were doing. Right. So it's very decentralized and there's no central authority who's kind of watching. One of the big problems in computer science is generating random numbers. What do you think? I think I'm still going to stay away from it. Back in New York City, I found I had the same obstacles as what I left, but this time I had a plan. So you're probably wondering, how did I survive? Oh, That's a lot of text right there. Yeah, whatever. We don't care about this shit. There it is. Look at that. Life on Bitcoin just got easier. That are the truest words I've ever seen written. Activate it, load it, spend it. There it is, the BitPay debit card. My lifesaver and most blatant loophole. You transfer bitcoins to the BitPay wallet, exchange the bitcoin into dollars directly through BitPay, and then load the dollars onto the card. Yes. I realize I'm not actually spending Bitcoin when I swipe the card, but if I didn't have a bank account and all my money was in Bitcoin, then this would be a useful option for transforming my Bitcoin into spendable currency. Either way, it was my savior. It actually doesn't work anymore. Everywhere. See that decline? So that means. What does that. What does that mean, Mom? That mom will pay for the very nice dinner you bought me. It's pretty embarrassing. So that is, like, one thing that's going to be. That's probably going to be really annoying is that I'm going to have to do two network transfers. One from Coinbase to BitPay and then one from BitPay two to the card. Two. Two network transactions. So I have double the network fees, though. If you're in Europe, you can get a Coinbase card, which pretty much does the same thing, except this. With Coinbase, regardless of the inefficiency, what really mattered was that now I was able to finally buy some New York pizza. Hi, can I please have two slices of the chicken? Thank you. Oh, yes. With the challenge coming to a close, I wanted to get some outside perspectives on the trials and tribulations I had endured. And who better to ask than those who had been closest to me throughout this journey. My parents. It's been really interesting watching you do this project. It's also been a bit difficult to watch because I watch go in with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm gonna do this. And quickly get discouraged when you were really hungry and couldn't buy anything and couldn't figure out the bitcoin. I see how stressful it's been for you to try to do this. You know, it's a very challenging kind of task. How do you even approach it? What do you do? To what extent can you really live off bitcoin? What compromises do you have to make? So, you know, I've seen it put a lot as a stressful experience for you, but also a learning experience. There are a lot of things you have to figure out. So I think it's been hard for you way, way back. At the beginning of this video, I named the two biggest questions of this challenge. Is it possible to live exclusively off of bitcoin? And what does it take to go fully digital? Simply put, at this point in time, bitcoin does not have enough purchasing power to bring it into the mainstream. It's nearly impossible to live off of bitcoin without any third party. But I'm confident that in today's world of unstoppable breakneck technological advancement, solutions will inevitably and eventually be found for everyone else who has a heart, soul, and maybe a few extra dollars to split. Keep your ears high and your nose to the ground, because before you know it, you may be able to buy a lot more with bitcoin than just a delicious, monstrously sized portion of the finest French. Sam. Hey, with Bitcoin, easy as 1, 2, 3. Cointelegraph like subscribe and hodl. Sam.