I took legal ownership of 6 acres of land in Portugal yesterday. It was a bit stressful at the final hurdle because of technical issues involving having to log into the main bank's site which is apparently different to the regular online site I'm used to using, and after a 30 minute phone call with support finally getting scuppered with a 7.5K EU transfer limit, which didn't cover the purchase, so we had to make a 90 minute round trip to my local but not so local bank branch.
En route I asked the loverly woman passing the land on to me what she was going to spend the sale money on - she said cryptocurrency (actually it was something else and crypto but the old brain-trigger went with C word and I can't remember what that something else was!?!)
Given the bank-transfer problems she said she'd take Bitcoin - I had my Trezor and lap-top with me, I could have literally pulled over, and paid her the full amount in BTC there and then in five minutes, and then job done, albeit it after a 15-30 minute wait for network times.
I did seriously think about the BTC option, but I opted for the Euros because...
- As soon as I sell that BTC it becomes UK taxable, and I'm hoping to hold onto it long enough to be able to qualify for NO TAX once I'm under Portuguese tax legislation.
- I think it may have been a legal requirement for funds to go through a Portuguese bank for the land purchase to be formally recognised - BTC may be free of national jurisdictions, land titles are most definitely not! And the contract of sale SPECIFICALLY said EU.
- I would find it odd transferring that much money to what is at time of transfer an entirely unknown to me BTC wallet, with no obvious links to the person I'm sending to!
On point 2, we had to send photos to the solicitor monitoring the sale of the bank transfer - not sure a screen capture of BTC wallet addresses would have gone down too well!
It would have been cool to pay in Bitcoin but...
That's about it - it would have been cool, there'd be a huge amount of Kudos about 'having bought my land with BTC' - but at the end of the day this is a formal purchase within the boundaries of the legal entity of Portugal - and you have to go through regular banking channels!
But it was still tempting!
And of course it would have been rolling the dice with my wealth - I would have bought back that BTC with EU next week, which means I could have either made or lost possibly several thousands of dollars, which would be great if that's to the upside, but you know BTC, there's no guarantee of that - and the thought of sitting there waiting for a pull back... been there, I'd rather not go there again.
Just a small corner of my newly purchased land!
The purchase eventually went through OK at the bank, even if they weren't happy about it (yes I know, it's another case of err... but it's my fucking money, thank you!).
So maybe that's another reason to hodl the BTC - it might well come in more useful in the future!
It's nice to meet other people into crypto - I plugged Hive, LEO and Rune, I think they already had some AVA, I could have gone on but the whole point of the land is to get me out of the cryptowonderland for half the day at least so I held back banging on about it too much;
For now I'm a happy bunny, planning what do to with said land!
And I'll get right to doing shit with it, right after a few bevvies!
Good day!