I want to quickly update you on what’s going on before you forget who I am and then we’ll take it from there.
I was selected for the Devconnect ARG Scholars program, which is a huge honor and opportunity. We are a group of 95 over-excited Ethereum ambassadors bouncing ideas off of each other as we are tasked with building bridges between Ethereum and other worlds. The ARG in that stands for Argentina, not argh-what-am-I-doing-here and we will be meeting at Devconnect 2025 in Buenos Aires!
Of course I will write about the conference itself but I’m also hoping to write about the experience of actually using crypto in Buenos Aires, which is famous for its very high crypto adoption. Pesos have been so volatile that the local population are desperate to hold their savings in literally anything else. The combination of stable coins and a cash card works great, because you can hold your money in USDT, only converting to pesos at the moment of the transaction. I’m interested in whether I can transact using cryptocurrencies more directly and how things look practically. My working title is Decentralized or Destitute.
As an early step, I’ve been trying to book cheap accommodation and paying in crypto, which hasn’t gone well. Every site I’ve tried (Betrustly, Ether.fi, Travala) has either ended up too expensive or has other issues which I was unable to overcome. Sure, I can spend a few grand on Edge City and pay directly in ETH. But for co-living and cheap hotel rooms, It seems to be “not quite there yet”. I even tried talking to a local directly about their apartment listed on Booking.com but they rejected my offer to pay in stablecoins outright. They were happy with dollars, euros or pesos but absolutely cash only, “no cripto”.
I booked my accommodation on a crypto cash card on principle, which was hardly the wallet-to-wallet experience I was hoping for. I wanted to cut out the financial service in the middle. I’ve seen a lot of hype about local companies built on Ethereum offering stable coin cards, but they are full KYC, centered around Argentine identity numbers, and fully custodial.
Right now, from the other side of the world, it seems like the solution is centralized systems that look exactly like banks except that they have little or no regulatory oversite. It doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. And I can’t help but wonder, if banks in Argentina allowed people to hold their savings in USD, would people stick to stablecoins?
I hope it will look better once I’m there because right now I’m just full of questions. I asked ChatGPT to summarise my notes so far as emojis, which I share with you as the most focused version of my thoughts so far:
🌎✈️🇦🇷
👨💻🎓 → 💭 “Argentina = 🚀 crypto nation!”
📱💰 Reality check:
Irony: “Decentralized” crypto → 🏦🏦🏦 (centralized apps)
🏪❌ (hostels don’t take crypto)
💳🏦 (cards need local ID)
🔑? ❌ (custodial = they hold keys)
🤝💸 peer-to-peer? 😅 not that I’ve found so far
Key question:
📰🗣️ “Crypto revolution!” vs.🧍♂️🤷♂️ “Can I buy empanadas?”
The other unexpectedly complicated preparation for my trip was getting vaccinated. I am an immigrant in an Eastern European country and I contacted my family doctor to say that I was going to Argentina. She referred me to the Clinic for Infectious Diseases, who told me that I should come in the following week.
The clinic receptionist asked me full volume what I was getting treated for before sending me upstairs to talk to the nurse.
The nurse waved away my insistence that I didn’t speak the local language, pointing out that I’d just said that in the local language. In halting words, I explained that I was going to Argentina and then sat back, my vocabulary expended.
She pulled up a browser with the website for the US Government Center for Disease Control already loaded. Slowly she read their page on travelling to Argentina in English and helpfully translated the key points for me.
Did I know about typhoid? A little, I said.
She gave me a list of instructions: don’t drink the water, don’t open my mouth while in the shower, use disinfectant on my hands after washing, use bottled water for brushing my teeth. Don’t eat… She paused, grumbling briefly at the CDC website, which apparently did not give enough food advice on their typhoid page, and said something that I didn’t understand. She rephrased again and then sighed at my lack of fluency; she didn’t know the words in English. “Don’t eat salads,” she settled on.
I grinned. “Eat steak?”
“Yes! Eat steak.” She was not smiling.
Now that that was covered, she shifted back to the local language to offer me vaccinations against yellow fever and hepatitis A. There was also a lot of rabies in Argentina, she told me, and then I got lost again. She shifted to English. If I got bitten by a dog or a monkey, I must go straight to the hospital.
I nodded to let her know that I was taking her advice seriously, while wondering how likely it was that I would be bitten by a monkey attending an Ethereum conference in Buenos Aires and also how it was that the nurse knew the English word for “monkey” but not the word for “uncooked food.”
Then she quizzed me on my intentions. What was I doing there? Was the conference for work or pleasure? Would I be with other people?
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck
Buenos Aires has a population of 16 million, so I was unlikely to be alone. Or was this a euphemistic phrase and she was working up to a talk on sexually transmitted diseases of Latin America? I told her I didn’t understand the question.
“Are you travelling alone?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be in the countryside?”
I shrugged. I was hoping to head out of town for a few days, if possible. I struggled with the phrasing but it turned out her English included the word “hiking”. She asked me another question where I understood only two words in the scramble: pleasure and risk.
Please god don’t let this be about sexually transmitted diseases. I apologized in English for not understanding.
“Do you like risk?”
I clamped my mouth shut, trying to keep the words Yes of course from leaving my mouth. It seemed like a bad idea to admit to liking risk in the Centre for Infectious Diseases.
“No?”
“Good!” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think we should give you the rabies shot.”
Over the next few minutes, I made sense of her logic. If I were alone and hiking, I was at higher risk of being bitten by something (a monkey?) and I would need urgent treatment. But equally, it would be harder for me to get treated immediately, as there was no one who could take me to the hospital. She didn’t want me to die of rabies, so she would give me two rabies shots here and then if I did get bitten in Argentina, it was less urgent, I just needed to tell them that I’d already had two of the four shots. With that, she began preparing a syringe. Apparently, the time for discussion was over.
So, that’s my update. I’m vaccinated, almost packed, and still trying to work out what “decentralized” actually means when it comes to finding a place to sleep.
I’ll report back once I’m safely in Buenos Aires and hopefully spending stablecoins with abandon.