My story

Every time I mention to someone what my job is about, and how I’m living here, they look at me as if I’m crazy. I have +3 years experience as a crypto-related journalist. I live in the third world (or maybe the seventh, as I prefer to say). My name is Javier Bastardo. I’m a Venezuelan bitcoiner that lost his keys in a terrible, but fun, beach party 🏖️. This is my story.

My parents were cops 👮, and now, they’re lawyers 💼. Originally I’m a philosopher, not a journalist, but I really love to write ✍️ and have found a way to make this my profession. I graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), one of the major universities in the country. It is known as “the House that defeat the shadow”. When I present my Masters Dissertation, I will become a Magister Scientiarum 👨‍🎓 in Philosophy and Human Sciences.

I was completely unaware about Bitcoin until late 2016, when I first read about it in the news. To be honest, I didn’t dig deep initially, but as you may be aware, my country is passing trough one of the biggest economic crisis in its history.

Before getting into Bitcoin, I had two jobs. I was covering politics, economics, sports and culture, and even that amount of effort wasn’t enough 😓. Having work isn’t enough in the current situation, you must be creative to overcome the struggle; and I was also very lucky 🍀.

I left one of my two old jobs, and started to research and write about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at CriptoNoticias, one of the biggest crypto-related media outlets in the Spanish-speaking community. My first piece was about China, and the rise of no-fees exchanges. A couple of months after that, I fully fall down the rabbit hole 🕳️🐇, writing (and learning) everyday about Bitcoin and crypto. What a ride since then!

Let me explain more about how it really is being a bitcoiner down here...

I will admit that I’ve been a “blockchain” enthusiast that believed in all kinds of use cases for different projects. Only after long hours of reading whitepapers, seeing Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects fail, and realising that there is no a real revolution in them, I came to my senses. I understood that the great idea, that powerful one, the one in a million one, is Bitcoin. I have been paid in LTC and ETH, and I appreciate DOGE, but I have understood that all of those are shitcoins, and blockchain is just a buzzword. Maybe there could be some DLT solutions, but Bitcoin is THE thing.

Believe me, I can recognize a scam when I see it. We have a governmental-pseudo-shitcoin here, “backed” with oil and commodities. It has a stable USD price, but fluctuates like hell in bolivars. A sophisticated scam, recently labeled a “Trojan Horse” by on of its creators after he escaped from Venezuela.

Bitcoin has been around for more than 10 years since its inception, so, I’m a newbie 🐤. I know many people that have spent more years working with, or studying this technology, even other Venezuelans with a deep expertise in the matter. But we’re in a very particular country. We have a very great laboratory down here, even shitcoins have become a thing here. The bolivar is simply worthless, nobody wants to hold it. So even being a newbie, I’ve been forced to become a user. To me, Bitcoin is a tool to survive this nightmare.

Even with a good job, prices are insanely high. I used to live in Altamira, and then I moved to La Pastora, an old hood where I live with less amenities. I haven’t taken any vacations, nor quit my job. You have to keep yourself flexible and open minded:

How will you cope without electricity for three days? A week? A month? How you will you live your life without water? Are you ready to run (or fight) for your life just for a cellphone?

This is a fucked up country. My job was a big window to get in touch with Bitcoin and the community, more importantly, the country forced us to look for alternatives, and Bitcoin is a big one.

Despite things getting worse with every passing month and year, thanks to Bitcoin, I now manage to survive on just one job. I have interviewed people like Giacomo Zucco and Franco Amati, and I have even travelled to report on an international event like the Blockchain Summit Latam.

This space gave me the opportunity to grow. I’m a Bitcoiner, and as I’m forced to work, I can’t imagine myself writing about anything else than Bitcoin and crypto-related things. And that’s how I made it to CoinTelegraph en Español.

I’m not an investor, but I love to earn sats instead of fiat. Even when I do work for people outside our little Bitcoin bubble, I find ways to make them buy BTC to pay me.

I’m 28 years old, and I’m almost bankless. I only have one account in a Venezuelan bank. No credit cards, no bank accounts outside my country. No Zelle, no PayPal. I don’t need any of that shit, because I know how to use Bitcoin. Everytime you find yourself promoting the bankless life, and the use of Bitcoin as a solution to our problems, know that I’m smiling 😊 at you right through your heart 🧡, from Caracas.

This whole journey, three years of reading, writing and learning about Bitcoin, talking with total strangers around the world about it, and sharing their ethos, gave me knowledge that I feel commited to share. I mean, back when I was a precoiner, I used to say that Bitcoin was too difficult to understand, that it was only about money and markets, and that I definitely had no time to understand the how, what and why about it. Well, I was wrong.

Now, I’m working on a project named Satoshi en Venezuela (but, don’t worry, I’m also reporting) that is focused in Bitcoin and education. We’re holding meeptups in various cities in Venezuela, and our goal is to create a community of users that have a good understanding about Bitcoin, more as a tool than as an investment opportunity. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

As we’re in the seventh world, we’re not able to have an investor profile. More than 60% of people in this country lives on minimun wage. That’s less than 3 USD a month. Merchants have to face their own problems, specifically because the process of refilling their stock is a pain. So we’re trying to make people curious about this powerful tool and technology.

Bitcoin as a Solution

As Venezuelan citizens, we don’t have real political liberties.

Our right to vote is just a theater. We’re living in a really sophisticated oppressive system, that has systematically reduced every point of opposition, and made the best of our people leave the country. Many of my own friends are now facing new problems in a diaspora all over the world. I think Bitcoin could help us in this too; besides solving the double-spending problem, Satoshi gave us the opportunity to separate money and state.

We’re learning the hard way that a government with totalitarian control, and power to print and regulate money supply, is the worst thing that could happen to a country. In fact (and this is one of the things that I find interesting philosophically with Bitcoin) we’re re-building our relation with things and value.

Prices change constantly and rapidly. I used to buy 200 grams of parmesan cheese, and eat it as I imagine an italian does. But now, I really understand the relation between Rodrigo Zeidan and salmon. If I have any chance to afford it, I buy 100 grams of pecorino cheese, and well… eat it as if I’m a wild man.

I know that I need some services and stuff, and that they have a very great value to me. Not in a hedonistic way, like eating cheese. Water, electicity, food, medical services. Everything is really expensive here, including basic things that human beings need. We have a subjective relation with those things. We value them even more since we can’t afford all of them at once. When you have to choose, you learn in a very real way how governmental control has played out. How long they have been silently restricting the citizens, limiting potential, making life frugal and unpredictable, even in the cities.

Bitcoin fixes this, or at least it has helped me fix it for me and my family. I earn sats, but I’m forced to burn them to cover my expenses. Even though I’m currently not able to be a long term holder, I’m using this technology to stand on my own feet.

People that are only familiar with bolivars (or dollars), have more worries than the ones that I know using Bitcoin. With Bitcoin I don’t have to find a buyer-seller by myself; I don’t have to move around Caracas with bills; I can pay the exact amount needed; nobody rejects my Bitcoin because the bills are too old, and most importantly, Bitcoin gave me back the opportunity to save money. Even if it’s not much, even if I can only hodl a few sats, even when USD value fluctuates. In a country devastated by hyperinflation, this is a holy opportunity, and 1 sat is 1 sat.

I’m not special and I’m still a newbie, but I think that Bitcoin could be really useful for people here. We’re not investors, and maybe we’ll be plebs for a very long time, but as long as money is kept under goverment’s hands and controls, Bitcoin will be a solution. We are experiencing this first hand.

Su fiel Javier…