If you ask ten different experienced travellers what the most annoying thing about travelling to another country is, the question of foreign exchange invariably comes up.

After all, moving to a country outside the euro zone comes with the requirement that you must purchase a certain amount of the local currency in order to be somewhat financially flexible when you arrive on your destination.

You can arrange this in advance at a bank or exchange office, or simply in the country itself. Whichever option you choose, you can be sure that you will be able to pay a lot for it. Not only will you often not get a favorable exchange rate, you will also have to pay transaction and other costs.

Withdrawing some money with your credit card at a foreign ATM will not be cheap, and you will be subject to fees from two sides: at the ATM itself, and from your bank.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an international currency that would allow you to carry out transactions quickly and cheaply anywhere in the world, without a lot of hassle?

Until ten years ago, such a scenario would have sounded future-proof, but today we already have the possibility to pay online with all kinds of cryptocurrency.

This is, of course, good news for you as a traveller. In this article, we explain what you can use cryptocurrency for during your travels.

In Short: What Is Crypto?

Cryptocurrency refers to decentralised digital coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin, which are based on revolutionary technology called blockchain.

It’s all a bit technical, but just remember that cryptocurrencies are completely digital, and no third person is involved in transactions.

In the traditional financial system, to send money to another person, you have to work through a bank or other agency, but with crypto it is all direct: peer-to-peer, person-to-person.

And what is even better: it is very difficult or even impossible to cheat with crypto. After all, the transactions are stored on the blockchain, and there must be consensus in the network before new blocks can be added.

So you can transact internationally very quickly, very securely and very cheaply with crypto. That is of course an ideal solution for a digital nomad or someone who travels often!

We can roughly distinguish the following 3 major categories when using crypto during your travels:

Practical Issues

Cryptocurrency is first and foremost a way to pay online, so you can use it to buy plane tickets, book a hotel, and so on.

It is also possible to purchase goods and services on site, but we should mention right away that this is by no means an order of the day.

Paying with crypto is still several years away from becoming a standard way to conduct financial transactions, and it also varies greatly from country to country.

Somewhere in a small village in the mountains of Peru you may not be able to buy food with your Bitcoin, but in a restaurant in Dubai, Switzerland or Singapore it is much more likely.

We can advise you to do good research in advance into the possibilities in the country you are moving to, and which websites or local companies already accept crypto.

If possible, also mention to those companies that you have chosen them because they accept crypto, so they see that there is an effective demand for it and we are one step closer to making crypto a standard method of payment all over the world.

Entertainment

With cryptocurrency, you can also pay for many entertainments online.

For example, you can tip your favourite streamers on Twitch in Dogecoin, and you can also pay with cryptocurrency at video game stores such as Microsoft’s Xbox.

You Can Make Money With Crypto When Traveling!

Finally, we come to the third and perhaps the most interesting application of cryptocurrency during your travels: making money with it.

Especially as a digital nomad, the ability to earn money online is an absolute must, and whether you’re going to live and work in Vietnam and need no more than $500 a month or somewhere in a metropolis such as Tokyo you will spend your time on $ 5,000 per month, you will have to find ways to earn your living digitally.

Many digital nomads have their own website, blog, or YouTube channel, or do some freelance activity such as translating, writing, or programming.

And of course, you can also earn a lot of money via the internet with cryptocurrency!

The most obvious form is simply investing, so buying crypto coins and selling them later for a profit.

That is of course, not a stable form of income, and it can often take a while before you really make a profit, so you can also consider day-trading, where you can use cryptocurrency from anywhere in the world, with just a laptop and an internet connection.

This is comparable to buying shares in the short term and selling them back at a higher price.

Other ways are writing about cryptocurrency (for your own website or for others, for example as a freelancer), crypto staking (where you “lend” your crypto coins and receive interest on them), setting up your own webshop where you accept crypto, and so on.

In short, whether you use crypto for practical purposes such as buying tickets, for some online entertainment, or to earn money, it is clear that there are many options.

It is sometimes said that cryptocurrency is the future of money, and if you look at the practical applications for travelers, you can say that there is something to it.