Australasia Tour Day 1

Australasia Tour Day 1

Hi folks, this is Paul Puey, CEO and Co-Founder of Airbitz. For the next two weeks I’ll be traveling the eastern hemisphere on a tour of Bitcoin conferences and meetups. I’ll first be speaking at the Bitcoin South conference in Queenstown, New Zealand then heading to meetups in Sydney and Melbourne. Checking in for my flight at the San Diego airport, I nearly learned a very tough lesson and one that I already knew and forgot. Travelers to Australia need a visa to get into the country! I had been to Australia before back in 2000 and the process to get a visa was a multi-day affair going to a travel agency. Luckily the lady at the checkin counter mentioned online quick one day visas. “Go do it now!” she said. Hell yeah I’ll do it now.

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Within an hour I had a visa confirmed through auvisa.org. Thank goodness times have changed.

I take my short puddle jumper flight over to Los Angeles which plops me into terminal 4. I have a near 1/2 mile walk to get to my New Zealand connecting flight. On the way I see a Starbucks. I had already drained my Starbucks gift card I bought from a friend who buys them off Cryptsy with Bitcoin. I had remembered seeing a coffee gift card company in the Airbitz directory when I had searched for gift cards awhile back. I search again, and there it is, Coin for Coffee, 20% off Starbucks. While in line I effortlessly send ~$4 worth in bitcoin from my Airbitz wallet and instantly get a $5 gift card. I scan it and get my usual extra small breve cappuccino. That was awesome. And the change was promptly returned to me in minutes. Now that’s a real bitcoin use case that saves consumers real money. Awesome!

At my gate, I run into Brett Stapper from Falcon Global Capital who is also headed to Bitcoin South. We get to talking about cool marketing and PR strategies and seeing how Falcon and Airbitz can work together and utilize each other’s strengths.

I’ll be spending the entire Thanksgiving Day in the air so until next time, happy turkey day everyone.

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