In late 2016, Didi Taihuttu and Romaine Taihuttu Smits, who are from the town of Venlo in the Netherlands, decided to sell everything they own, empty their bank/retirement accounts, and bet it all on Bitcoin.
As the Dutch couple, who have three children (Joli, Juna, and Jessa), explained in their first blog post (titled “Lets meet the family”), which was published on 3 June 2017, although they owned “a nice and healthy company,” they decided to do something about their dream of “exploring the world.”
Since Didi (the husband) was “on the border of a burnout” and as a family they badly “needed a break,” they liquidated all of their assets, and started their new life by booking flight tickets to Bangkok, Thailand.
Earlier this week, the “Bitcoin Family” gave an interview to MacKenzie Sigalos, a Senior Producer for CNBC Digital, who published an article based on this interview on December 5. Here, we focus on some highlights from this article.
According to the CNBC article, the Bitcoin Family went all in on Bitcoin when the price was around $900. They then made a promise to themselves to never pay for any goods/services until they “found a person who was willing to accept bitcoin.”
Since the Bitcoin Family started their new life, they have spent time in 40 countries. Despite the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies over the past few years, it has, at times, been difficult to only pay with Bitcoin, but according to the CNBC article,”through a combination of bartering, bargaining, bitcoin debit cards, and convincing vendors to accept the cryptocurrency, the family has managed to traverse much of Europe, Asia, and Oceania.”
The Bitcoin Family says that the most Bitcoin-friendly city they have visited is Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, where they were able to pay for almost everything (e.g. cinema tickets and car repairs) with Bitcoin.
Didi says:
“In my opinion, any country, any city in the world, can have the same adoption of bitcoin as a store of value, or payment, or peer-to-peer cash. This is what keeps driving us to explore the world.”
He went on to say that just because they have been using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, it does not mean that Bitcoin is not a great store of value asset:
“I believe bitcoin is slowly becoming more a store of value. We see bitcoin as a brick of digital gold that stores value, and sometimes, tremendously increases in value, but you can also take that brick of gold into a store and pay with it.”
According to their Instagram blog, currently, the Bitcoin Family is visiting Lagos, a town in southern Portugal’s Algarve region. In addition to the blog on their website and their blog on Instagram, the Bitcoin Family documents their adventures on their YouTube channel.
