This Man Traveled Around The World For 18 Months Spending Only Bitcoin

At the end of 2014, everyone was telling programmer Felix Weis that Bitcoin was dead.

“I knew it wasn’t true because I used Bitcoin at least once a week in Berlin,” he recalls. (Though originally from Luxembourg, he had been living there for two years.)

After hearing about Bitcoin back in 2012, he had since founded a Bitcoin coworking space but there were too few Bitcoin companies to keep it afloat. He was also active in the Bitcoin forums and had written a Python library for Bitcoin.

But one thought nagged at him. Back when he first heard about Bitcoin, he immediately thought that, if this were truly a “world currency” — one that could be used regardless of what country you were in — someday people should be able to make round-the-world trips using it.

“I thought maybe it would be 10 to 15 years from [then],” he says, but as it turned out, he packed up his bags and embarked on that voyage within two years — on January 12, 2015.

Since then, Weis has been to 27 countries and 50 cities, spending — according to the rules he established — only bitcoin.

His three stipulations were:
No banks. And that meant no Western Union, no money exchanges, no converting USD to euros, no euros to yen.
Bitcoin first. He had to use Bitcoin whenever possible.
Cash only for bitcoin. Recognizing that there would be times when he would need local currency, he allowed himself to do peer-to-peer exchanges of bitcoin for cash. And that led to some fun adventures.

Felix Weis on Yap

During his bitcoin-funded trip, the cryptocurrency underwent a maturation. Undoubtedly, things looked bleak for Bitcoin when Weis departed. For more than a year, the price had been falling after surpassing $1,000 at the end of 2013. In fact, his journey began around the nadir, two days before the price briefly slipped under $200. But over the next year and a half, as Weis visited both Bitcoin-accessible countries like the United States and less Bitcoin-enabled ones like Cuba, the currency steadily regained its footing.

It began to shed its reputation as the currency of choice for drug dealers and other criminals. Its technology was embraced by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and Visa. It weathered some political infighting that made headlines but ultimately did not drive the new technology, which was being compared to the internet in its significance, off its course.

And just as Weis’s trip was coming to a close, the community was anticipating a special event, one set to happen roughly every four years until about 2140. The currency’s unique monetary policy decrees that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and the amount of new bitcoins (which are released every 10 minutes) would drop by half every four years.

So, as the community awaited Bitcoin’s second “halving,” the man who had spent the previous 18 months traveling the world spending only this digital currency returned to Berlin, just in time to attend, on Saturday, a Bitcoin halving party.

Here’s how Weis, 28, survived, what insights he has about Bitcoin and what he learned about the nature of money. (The interview has been edited and condensed.)