Quote from: pearlmen on August 26, 2017, 06:27:23 PM

Quote from: bitesquina on August 26, 2017, 09:38:43 AM

If you travel abroad from time to time, you are probably used to change money: to do so, you have to find a change office and accept the rates they offer. Many of them also ask to pay a fixed-amount fee, they want more money than what they get from the fx rate.... If it is a touristic place, there may be a little competition from different change offices, at least, if they don't agree prices. But in general, as an individual, you have very little power, you can't hardly negotitate, only accept what they propose... On the other side, if you choose to withdraw money from an ATM with your credit card, you will be paying the FX rate your bank decides to apply to you, with potentially other fees...

However, if Bitcoin become an accepted currency in shops worlwide, we could avoid to change money to the local currency. We will still need to change from OUR currency to Bitcoin, but I feel that we have a much larger negotiting power on that:
- you can do it anytime from your home
- you may automatically buy Bitcoin with a given limit at interesting rates, intead of accepting the prices proposed by a few change offices in the area
- you may have already created a Bitcoin wallet and be used to it: you will automatically understand if a price in a shop is cheap or expensive because you are used to see prices in bitcoins, instead of having to translate into your currency...
- you may keep the remaining money in Bitcoins and still be able to use it when you are back home, etc...

Bitcoin would work as a parallel universal currency, a situation that already exists with USD in many countries, where it is used in parallel with the local currency.

But of course, prior to that, it will need to become widely accepted and have a more stable price

What do you think? Have you ever used bitcoin when travelling abroad?

I have actually thought about it as well that rather than going from here to another country and having to go through all those bottlenecks, I will just decide to keep my money in btc and sell when I get there but there will equally be limitation so far btc has not been generally accepted and its because some Point of Entry officers always mandate that one have required amount of cash to be able to enter and aside that, one needs to understand how it works there at the moment or else. The first action in a foreign country will be committing an offence.

OP has a pretty good idea, here are a few caveats:

You can use most bank cards , esp those with the 3Dsecure feature, damn near internationally. If they accept a card, they will usually accept a 3dsecure branded card. You will pay a fee, however, for using it outside of its boundaries.

You can bring bitcoin, but in some countries, as a foreigner there I would want to use a bank, or a known service, to convert from bitcoin to local fiat. There are horror stories of guys getting scammed on the board during in person transactions; not speaking the language would also be a huge barrier to using trusted guys on localbitcoins (local bitcoin is freaking everywhere). Local cops might not look too fondly on a foreign person crossing the border and immediately starting to convert into local currency from a crypto, they dont have alot of trust everywhere just yet, and are still associated with criminal bullshit in the eyes of the public.

Same deal when you eventually leave. If you have local fiat, it would be a pain to convert that to bitcoin. You would end up converting it back to your native fiat, for when you get home, at a fee.

Best solution, and the most secure? A traveler's check. There is a reason why they are named as such Wink