Introduced 5 or 6 people to Bitcoin Cash, each using it differently daily now.

How the flaxx did I do that then??

I hadn't planned on writing about this event or action or whatever it is that happened, because until yesterday I thought it only had brought one person into using Bitcoin Cash, and that person turned out to be a HODLer even.

Yesterday I found out though that beyond my knowledge that one person I had brought to using Bitcoin Cash had, in turn, convinced 1 person to abandon BTC, and 4 others to ask their boss, who's the one of... wait, I better start this from the beginning to make sense to anyone reading this.

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So, here is the story from start to finish:

As some may know, I have reason to use alternate ways to spend my Bitcoin Cash, to swapping them for fiat and transferring that to my bank account.

As it happened, I found my friend to be willing to swap my Bitcoin cash for Fiat money without fees, except for the transfer fees for the BCH transfer.

Maybe it is not as completely honest as it should be, but neither is the regulation I am sentenced to even to this day.

Both of us benefitted.

For me, this was hitting two birds with one stone:

• first, I had my friend introduced to Bitcoin cash, and as he opted for having an account on Kraken for me to send the Bitcoin Cash to as opposed to a paper or hardware wallet.

(Yes I explained to him the security risks involved with exchange wallets, as opposed to paper wallets, he was enchanted by the nice charts and stuff the Kraken exchange offered and said he wanted to get into trading. which he never did so far...)

• Second, i had found a way of getting my (fiat) spending (pocket) money cheaper. I didn't have to spend the fees associated with selling my Bitcoin Cash for fiat money, only the transfer fees for sending the Bitcoin Cash to another wallet address.

Disappointment of sorts.

I found out after sending him BCH a couple of times that he was only HoDLing the Bitcoin Cash i sent him. He was not using it, nor was he going to spend it.

Nothing to brag about in the BCH adoption scale of things.

It was for that reason that I was reluctant to write an article, about me onboarding one person, and him being hodler. But little did I know that my friend had become a BCH enthusiast himself and spread the BCH awareness and interest to others.

Bitcoin Cash at work, at work.

No, that is not a grammar error, but exactly what i meant to say. He made Bitcoin Cash work, at work.

My friend turned out to have discussions with his boss, during breaks and lunches, about cryptocurrency, as his boss had apparently bought some Bitcoin en Ethereum as an investment, hoping to see the investment grow into, well whatever it is that people with no knowledge of cryptocurrency believe they will get ROI eventually.

A couple of weeks of discussions and convincing later, my friend eventually managed to convince his Boss to convert the Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash, at least for the most part.

The discussions between my friend and his Boss, and the Boss's adoption of Bitcoin Cash, had drawn the attention of some of my friend's colleagues, who had listened, quietly, to the conversations at the lunch table where they ate their lunches.

I got some Splainin' to do

Okay, before I get to the rest of the story, I need to explain something about the way taxes work over here. And with that explanation the complete ludicrousness of the tax system here will become evident, making another case for why Bitcoin Cash is so much better than Government Bank controlled finance systems.

You see, my friend, his colleagues, and his Boss work a full-time work week each week from Monday to Friday. Completely by the rules, paying the wages as per union agreed salaries, a percentage being paid to insurance (health and liability and the like), another percentage to the pension fund, and another percentage paid to the government for other stuff that is too boring to describe in detail. Long story short, during the week they work the jobs on the books, and they all make stupid amounts of money. My friend and his colleagues get paid some of the highest salaries this country knows for jobs doing manual labor. The company, of which his Boss is the only owner and Chief Executive Officer, makes huge profits from their work during the weekdays, as well as paying the Boss a salary for his job as CEO.

On the weekends though, they also work the same jobs, only they work, as we call it, "black". They make a deal with the clients in which the client pays the Boss in cash, with no paper trail, and the Boss gives the client a generous discount in return. My friend and his colleagues also get paid in cash, with no paper trail, and get paid almost double their usual pay in return.

And even with the client paying less, and the Boss paying more, the Boss still makes more profit from a job "Black" than he does when they do the job by the books on the record! THAT is how many taxes and insurance and pension and who knows what else kinds of cuts the Boss has to take out of the normal revenue he gets from a client as payment for the job he does for them.

So with that in mind, we return to the story.

My friend had been thinking since he got into Bitcoin Cash because of me, and reading more about crypto in general and Bitcoin Cash in particular, that Bitcoin Cash, when done right, could be a great solution to the "Metal Box" problem that he and his colleagues were running into more and more than their "black" cash money began to accumulate. You see, my friend and his colleagues are, most of them, single men who live in relatively cheap rental homes and have very little monthly bills to pay. No mortgage, no payments on car financing loans, or anything like that. So their normal salary, the one they get during the week, was more than enough for them to have money left over at the end of the month.

The "black" money they got on weekends was spent on luxury things, spent during holidays, and in other ways that didn't leave a paper trail, or at least drew little attention from anyone to wonder where they were getting the money from if you catch my drift. In short, they were having difficulty laundering that money and eventually began putting it in a metal box at home, saving it up for... something, which they couldn't really say either.

But then they learned that their Boss had begun to invest some of his money into cryptocurrency, and my friend drew their attention to Bitcoin Cash, and how easy it could be used, how fast the transactions were, and how it could be used in a way that didn't get the attention of the governments, the IRS or any other agency that might be interested in them.

For my friend and four of his colleagues, Bitcoin Cash changed a lot!

The five of them jointly asked their Boss if he wouldn't be willing to pay them with Bitcoin Cash instead of with cash fiat money. The Boss took a week or two to do some research but then agreed to it, and together they worked out a way to get the "black" money from the boss, using a non-KYC regulated p2p service, to a (paper) wallet which my friend and his colleagues share.

Mixing and tumbling ("kleine wasjes, grote wasje, last maar lekker draaien")

From there, their scheme is somewhat opaque as they were reluctant to explain their exact scheme to me, but it involves a BCH mixer and "another anonymizing step" it eventually gets transferred to the individual wallets of my friend and his colleagues.

Trading, and "playing the market" in hopes of becoming millionaires.

Two of my friend's colleagues apparently spend their evenings and other free time playing the crypto markets doing short-term trades trying to get rich "playing the market".

A birthday gift for a daughter's 18th birthday.

Another colleague is HODLing the Bitcoin Cash on the wallet and will keep doing so until his daughter turns 18, at which point he'll give the BCH to her on a hardware wallet for her birthday.

A good cause.

The last colleague of the four has apparently found a way to donate the BCH he's making to a foundation that's funding research into an incurable disease. I was asked not to name either the disease or the foundation, and also to keep the reason for him donating to that specific foundation to myself. It is such a rare disease that he fears for his privacy.

My friend the HODLer?

And my friend. Well, he is no longer just HODLing either. The gaming computer and the media/entertainment system he's got set up at his home is simply breathtaking, and unlike anything I've ever experienced in person.

And no one who hasn't visited his home or knows my friend personally knows about it, let alone how it was paid for!

Oh just doing some dyi home improvement....

I found out about this when my friend invited me over to his place last weekend after I hadn't seen him for a week or two. I knew he was doing some "DYI home improvement" which had him busy every moment of his spare time, so I didn't think much of us not seeing each other for a couple of weeks. Wasn't the first time, and won't be the last time, we have weeks we have only discorded or WhatsApp contact.

"DYI Home Improvement." like a boss!!

But he was finished last weekend and showed off the "DYI home improvement" he had done. I was blown away, and when he told me the story about the way Bitcoin Cash had kind of made it possible, and how his boss and colleagues had benefitted, each differently, from using Bitcoin Cash instead of Fiat Cash money like they used to do I couldn't help but smile and feel pride.

My small little scheme to save me what amounts to maybe €5,= per month in fees by sending Bitcoin Cash to my friend instead of selling it for euros and then spending it (which is what the Binance debit card really does) started six (or more) influenced at least six people's lives in not insignificant ways. And I guess that is the lesson here that can be drawn:

You too can spread the awareness of and use of Bitcoin Cash and touch lives!

Get your friends into Bitcoin Cash, send some BCH to a wallet, and give it as a gift to your family. Talk about Bitcoin Cash with your colleagues, and use Bitcoin Cash in ways you haven't thought of before. You never know which action, or who will end up adding one or more members to the Bitcoin Cash community.

Granted. I know that in the grand scheme of things like adoption or onboarding or gaining a bigger market share against the BTC my actions and those of my friends and his colleagues will not be the decisive things that will make the difference on the markets and the future of Bitcoin Cash. But it doesn't hurt either. I'm sure that at least 4 people are now publicly advocating Bitcoin Cash to their friends, family, and other aquaintances. If they achieve the same, that is 4x4=16 people advocating BCH. f those 16 each reach 3 people, that is 3x16=48.

Anyway, my most important bottom line in these stories is:

Maybe that last calculation is wishful thinking but anyway. For me, the bottom line is that I have more pocket money outside of my living budget which I can use to make my son happy every weekend (used to be once a month, by the way, so even that is improved a lot). And making my son happy, which I spend about €20,= every other weekend on, gives me enough joy to keep motivated enough to continue the struggle to get free from my "bewindvoering" at some point in the future and finally be (debt)free again!