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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

In what situations has Bitcoin saved you, and where (country, city)? The reason I ask is because I cannot recall seeing any shops which would accept bitcoin, and the last ATM that bought BTC for cash I knew of in my locale disappeared a little while ago.

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I usually travel with $10000 cash with me and use Bitcoin to pay for hotels and flights. Shops accept USD at a lot of places around the world.

I travel for half year every winter to south / central america from Europe, and there have been cases when my bank cancelled my credit card because of technical problems with contactless payments even though I didn't need contactless.

Another time Revolut just blocked my access to their app for a few days until I could prove where I got the money from.

Another time a bank blocked my card because I was travelling and they thought it's a fraud.

Depending on banks for long travels far from my home is scary, so I make sure I always have enough BTC and cash to survive.

That’s a lot of cash to travel with.

Yep, I would never carry this much on me. In most countries you need to declare such amount when crossing the border, and explain why you have it. And of course in the US any cop on the street can just take it from you, with no recourse.

I would carry 500-1000 USD at most.

There is recourse. The USA has due process.

One thing about civil asset forfeiture is that it is an action against the property, not the person. So, the cash itself is a "suspect" not you. You can't even file a complaint, because you are not a party to the whole case.

Exactly. Airports in the European Union have signs warning passengers about such rules for carrying large sums of cash.

When carrying €10,000 or more into or out of the European Union, you must complete a cash declaration. In practice, I'd feel uncomfortable carrying more than I'd be happy to count while hurrying for a plane, especially if the value were close to the limit and in a currency other than Euros. (Other currencies are explicitly included in the EU rules, which makes sense, not least because some EU member states use other currencies instead of Euros.) I don't know whether you can complete a cash declaration in case the exchange rate changes such that the value of your cash crosses the threshold, but if you can't then maybe carrying cash close to the limit would attract a lot of attention from customs or airport security (because it might look like you're violating the rules until the cash had been counted and the interest rate checked).

,,When carrying €10,000 or more''

This is not true, you can carry 10000 EUR without declaration, you just neet to declare if you carry more (I look at the regulation and of course eurusd before I start my travel for winter).

I stand corrected. Weirdly, the European Union website (which I didn't read carefully enough earlier) contradicts itself on that point:

"Entering or leaving the EU after 3 June 2021 with cash or certain valuable items worth over EUR 10 000? ... "all travellers entering or leaving EU territory are already obliged to complete a cash declaration when carrying EUR 10 000 or more"

https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs-4/prohibitions...

Sure, I use fake suncream holder to hold the cash, and it's the limit that doesn't need to be declared on the border. I'm of course not the average traveler, most people stay in long term stays who go for long travels.

> Another time a bank blocked my card because I was travelling and they thought it's a fraud.

I was traveling recently and when trying to pay for a hotel room the transaction was declined. I needed to call my bank to explain that I am traveling, so they tuned down their anti-fraud alerts. Thankfully, one phone call was all it took to resolve this.

However, this block was only triggered because the transaction in question was relatively high amount ($1500), the very same card would still work perfectly for small transactions.

You're brave to have $10k in cash on you!

While traveling through Europe this summer, I noticed many small currency exchange shops process cryptocurrencies. What surprised me most is that many shops handled a wide selection of what I would call shitcoins, not just BTC and ETH.

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