While most of the content these weeks has been about the price of Bitcoin tanking and the never-ending hodl/bitcoin-is-dead debate, I hope I can make your day a bit better:
I'm happy to have received my first ever Bitcoin donation! (Props to BTCPayServer for being so awesome and easy to install 👏).
While ~8000 Sats or $3 seems like nothing, it means a lot to me and to the world.
I come from one of those random countries in Central America where we used to have pen pals in the 90's from the States who asked us if we had skateboards, pizza, McDonalds, or mostly coconuts (we had all, btw).
I was into coding since a very young age (10) and always thought that selling stuff online was going to be the future -- but unfortunately that future was cut very short for me, a non US/European/fancy Asian citizen with a million of hurdles to overcome (which have been reduced, but sadly still exist) in order to receive money.
In order to accept payments through Paypal 15 years ago, I had to go through an incredibly weird and lucky series of event (I literally mailed papers to a bank in hopes of getting a bank account in the US and DID get the account. How in hell, I have no clue. The bank went belly up but I was lucky to withdraw before). Paypal is not without controversy, but I still thank them for having made it at least somewhat possible (I never had a bad experience with them, but know plenty of people who did).
I will never forget the day I called HSBC bank, asking for a US corporate bank account and that I was ready to sign the paperwork. The minimum deposit needed was north of $100,000 or $1 million US, I can't even remember. I felt frustrated, humiliated, and almost gave up. (I had $2000 in my bank account).
Since then, the list of processors I have used has grown exponentially (in order to escape centralization and having all my eggs in one basket), some you probably never even heard of -- MoneyBookers, Clickbank, 2Checkout, Stripe, I even had plenty of customers paying me through MONEYGRAM. It was such as headache to have to explain to the Moneygram clerk that I wasn't selling weird shit. A lot of my hard-earned money disappeared when these services stopped accepting my money or the withdrawal rate was too high to afford.
Now I have all the processes set up and work for bigger companies for a nice job I can't complain about, but the 19-year-old in me, who had to go through all this crap just because I was not born with the right passport can finally be in peace, knowing that others who happen to be unlucky and unbanked, with the right ideas and passion, but with the wrong papers can finally accept magic internet money.
Money for the people.
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