2.5 years ago I moved to Dubai with my wife and 2 kids and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life.
Some personal context:
I was born and raised in Belgium, the center of Europe. I always lived close to my parents who came over very often to visit the kids. I never had the intention of moving to another country. I did travel a lot and I've met many of you around the globe.
Then with the Covid hysteria and lockdowns I actually felt more and more how insane the policies in the West were. I was paying 50% income tax + 21% VAT on everything and meanwhile I saw the quality of life deteriorate rapidly.
My son was going to kindergarten/FS2 (depending on your school system) and the quality of education was horrible. Private schools aren't really a thing in Belgium, you have a handful in the 2 major cities (Antwerp and Brussels) but these are the exception and 95% of the students are from expats. Belgium's public education system used to be top notch, growing up I always felt that for me it worked great. But when my son went to school, he wasn't challenged, everything went at the pace of the slowest kids. He was bored in school and I felt I was letting him down.
At the time we were living in a small village (10k people) in a nice house with a huge garden, I loved that house. It was at the end of a cul de sac and no one ever came there. Then in 12 months time we had 2 burglaries in 2 different houses in the street. For the first one our house was actually the main target, however we got lucky since I accidentally left the lights on everywhere. On the cameras I installed I saw them jump over our 2 meter (6.5 feet) fence, walk to the house, check inside and jump back over the fence. Since then we didn't really feel that safe anymore.
The 2nd burgarly was during the day and they broke in to a house where they had 2 guard dogs and only ran away when the owners came home.
They were never caught, the police didn't do much.
The combination of covid hysteria, bad education, safety concerns and high taxation while not getting anything in return made me actively start looking for alternatives.
Picking the right place to live
I like order and I like lists. I started making a list of my requirements to move to a new country. This is going to be different for pretty much every person and let me start of by saying "There is no perfect country".
For me personally the following were the most important requirements:
- Safety
- Good education
- No/low taxes
- Good Quality of Life
- Good weather
Less important factors still to be considered:
- Friendliness to expats
- English speaking
- No natural disasters (guess this also falls under safety)
- Easy to travel to/from
- Entertainment for me and the kids
First things first: I didn't want to live in the EU anymore. I feel that the EU is just a ticking time bomb and everything is just getting worse. The only exception to this would've potentially been Madeira.
Madeira had a lot of potential but then fell short for me personally in the end.
I've done my research on all Caribbean Islands and while exceptionally beautiful and no taxes there are a lot of other issues there.
So naturally I came to the conclusion to move to... Switzerland.
Yeah I didn't even consider Dubai at that time, it felt far away from my family and the weather so I hadn't even given it a proper evaluation at that point.
Switzerland was the logical solution, safe, stable, center of Europe, while outside of the EU. We would still have to pay taxes but that would be possible with a lump sum payment. Cost of living was a concern and the fact that we would have to learn Italian wasn't ideal but better than Belgium for sure. We were actively looking for properties in the Lugano area because weather-wise that's as close to Mediterranean climate as you can get. We found a school, which was very expensive and not perfect but better than the one in Belgium. Told my tax advisor to plan everything for a move to Switzerland. Told my parents we were moving to Switzerland. Everything seemed ready. This was in February-March 2021.
I had planned a beach holiday to Dubai for April 2020. But you know what happened in early 2020, the world shut down and we weren't able to travel.
So I had it rescheduled for the Easter break at school for April 2021.
We came to Dubai and loved the holiday. There were so many things to do for both adults and kids. Everything was designed for the heat and indoors, you move from AC to AC when it's hot. We felt safe and during the vacation my wife jokingly said that we should move there instead. All the prejudices of being in a Muslim country just faded away.
When we got back to Belgium I did some more research and it made a lot more sense for us to move to Dubai. No taxes, high quality of life, real estate is way more affordable in Dubai, private school was in English and higher quality and while Lugano is absolutely beautiful... there really isn't that much to do there.
Jun 4, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Last year a lot of realtors said they accepted crypto in Dubai, but if you pushed them they really didn't know a lot about it. They used intermediaries that often took a 7% fee.
I used an intermediary that took "only" 1% back then but would only take $USDT
The intermediary would take $USDT and write a manager's check to pay for the property and Dubai Land Department registration fee. A year ago he said he was doing 2-3 deals a week and he guesstimated he had about 10% of the market of doing crypto to property deals in Dubai.
Aug 25, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I'm retiring my Twitter account.
I've been in this space for 8 years & it's time for me to move on.
I've always felt as a bit of an outsider but within this community I discovered that there are way weirder mfers out there than me. Which is totally fine. Be weird, be different.
I've made some friends for life.
2016-17 were intense because of the blocksize war of which I am a veteran who fought on the right side of history.🙃
2018-20 were the MCF days with a very successful conference. Still a bit sad we couldn't organize the physical conference in 2020.
Jun 11, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
I'm excited again about #Bitcoin, just as I was when I just discovered it.
El Salvador making it legal tender is quite literally Satoshi's Vision.
But instead of writing articles about how this is literally helping people get out of poverty in a developing nation...
"journalists" are writing about attendees getting Covid at Bitcoin 2021 conference.
This is just infuriating.
You could be writing about how Bitcoin is helping save 360 000 households in El Salvador by reducing the remittance fees by about $1 billion a year (20%).
Jun 9, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
There will be a government wallet for their merchants, because everyone has to be able to accept it.
For accounting purposes, balance sheets for example will obviously still be in reported in USD.
You can pay back loans in Bitcoin, even pre-existing loans.
The bill will be signed by the president either this evening or tomorrow morning and will go into effect immediately.
There will be 90 days of preparation to get the infrastructure ready. Because obviously not everyone can start accepting it tomorrow.
Jun 6, 2021 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
The insanity of travelling during Covid.
The plan was a simple Friday-Sunday trip to Bucharest.
Due to airlines having less routes there were no direct flights Brussels - Bucharest.
No worries @lufthansa had me covered
Brussels - Frankfurt - Bucharest
Bucharest -Vienna - Brussels
Every country has its own rules, own locater/registry forms etc.
So for the first leg to Germany you need a negative PCR test. No worries. Panda went to take the test on Wednesday. Now some websites said it couldnt be older than 48 hours, other said 72. Anyway mine was 48. Gucci.
Mar 19, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I've been thinking a lot lately about economic migration lately.
For many of us #Bitcoin was the red pill we needed to see more clearly what's really going on in the world and the people running the governments. (I know, some you were already "woke" before you discovered BTC.)
A year of lockdowns. A year of restrictions on basic freedom. A year of printing an insane amount of money.
A year of total incompetence, even more so than usual, of most governments around the world... and now the vaccination strategies and passports.
There are so many red flags
Jun 29, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What Joe conveniently isn't mentioning is that it doesn't matter if they were direct market buys.
The $BTC getting locked up on $GBTC are not redeemable so they're effectively locked/off the market.
More coins going off the market than are being mined.
There are a couple of different scenario's here: 1. People send money to Grayscale, Grayscale buys them. According to the Messari research this is ~30% of coins mined after the halving 2. OGs/Funds send their coins to GBTC to take advantage of the premium. This has 6 month lockup
Jun 10, 2020 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
A couple of people asked me about this thread.
Tbh it's one of the dumbest takes I've seen in recent years but I'll address it.
First of all: Dominance is one the dumbest indicators in this industry. It's easily manipulated and we currently have 5500 "cryptocurrencies" (tokens & stablecoins)
If I buy 1 coin with 1 billion supply for $1, I just created a billion dollar marketcap coin.
May 15, 2020 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
With the start of the 4th #Bitcoin epoch we'll soon see another big influx of new people into this space.
Here are some of my thoughts and observations after 7 years in this space.
Is it too late to buy Bitcoin?
No, also: you don't have to buy a full Bitcoin. Don't invest money you can't afford to lose or might need soon. This is a risky investment.
Even if you decide to buy Bitcoin now, in a couple of years people will tell you that you just got lucky.
Jul 31, 2019 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Nick has some very strange takes on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Nick used to work at Coinbase which explains a lot.
Comparing marketcap after 4 years is stupid because Bitcoin came from 0. Ethereum started with a shady ICO and (ab)used Bitcoin's name to give it value.
The entire narrative then was "Ethereum is Bitcoin 2.0" these takes were actively promoted by investors & founders abusing Bitcoin's brand.
Using txns/day for 2 completely different projects makes no sense. Bitcoin is for payments/wealth transfer. Ethereum to send cryptokitties.
Sep 13, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
As a monetary Bitcoin maximalist (trade shitcoins to make more BTC) it's interesting to see both sides. Ofc $ETH isn't going to 0 yet. There's too much money behind it. It'll pump again. Will it ever reach its ATH again vs BTC? Doubtful. Will it reach ATH vs USD? Depends on BTC.
Very few coins die just like that as long as there is a decent exchange supporting it and there are some people working on it. Look at all those old coins that are still alive. Accumulate, pump, distribute/dump.
Aug 23, 2018 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
*Trigger warning* Why have the Ripplers become so obsessed with decentralization even though it's a premined centralized altcoin which was so centralized that a part of the history is lost forever? A thread.
A post posted on Ripple.com by their CTO who claims Ripple has nothing to do with $XRP, even though it was posted on Ripple.com, described the decentralization aspects of $XRP ripple.com/insights/the-i…
Jul 16, 2018 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
I think there's an interesting dynamic between VC's/Funds and Bitcoiners.
A lot of the VC's value different properties and have different views on things. The most obvious reason why is Austrian vs Keynesian economics. If you're in this space and still don't know the difference.
Educate yourself. Here are some sources: zerohedge.com/sites/default/… economicreason.com/austrianeconom…
$BCH isn't a scam, but it kinda is. BCash isn't a scam because #Bitcoin is an open-source project and anyone can fork it (and sometimes it feels that almost everyone did at some point). The software isn't the problem, it's certain people behind it that are committing fraud.
BCash came into existence as an attempt to strong-arm Bitcoin users and businesses. It was backed and funded by 3 people: Roger Ver, Jihan Wu and Craig Wright. Again: no issue with them forking off, their choice and they want to try to take a different route, which is fine.
