Hold your bitcoin to the end or sell a little to start a family? For one bitcoiner in northwest London, it was a no-brainer.
A British Noodle (not his real name) who first heard about Bitcoin around 2012, made profits from his Bitcoin purchases to pay for his wife’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. He told Cointelegraph he had “no regrets” about his decision to start a family using fiat-denominated earnings from buying, holding and then selling bitcoin.
Welcome Noodle Jr II into this crazy world. After spending 6 difficult days in the hospital due to unexpected complications, Ms. Noodle and I couldn’t be happier to bring this little one home! pic.twitter.com/JvlLfzABgg
– Noodle
(NoodleNakamoto) June 14, 2022
Noodle first found out about Bitcoin at the end of 2012, when one Bitcoin was worth about $13.
“I was in the gym talking to this guy that I get along well with. We were talking in the locker rooms, which is funny because he was trying to explain the Silk Road thing to me — which was on the dark web.”
The now defunct Silk Road Market was a place where early Bitcoin users could buy and sell almost anything with Bitcoin as the internal currency. At the time, Noodle didn’t necessarily reject Bitcoin despite his gym friend’s recommendation, but he did pass it on until a close friend explained how to buy cannabis with Bitcoin on the Silk Road.
Once a close colleague explained that they might be able to use bitcoin to buy real-world goods, Noodle was convinced:
“And I thought let’s do it…so we bought seven bitcoins and at the time – it was $57.”
The price of Bitcoin has since gone up about 400 times, reaching $2,022 in a bearish market cap. For Noodle in 2013, he explained that Bitcoin was very hard to come by – it was a “really complicated process”. However, he persevered and managed to get Bitcoin to buy the goods. Unbeknownst to him, Noodle also stumbled into a rabbit hole and his Bitcoin journey was just beginning.
Once the weeds arrived, I was just below the rabbit hole, as I was researching everything. I never thought I’d be interested in fiscal policy, in the macroeconomic outlook, etc – any of those things!
For Noodle, Bitcoin opened his eyes to finance, education, and a whole world of new information. From fractional reserve banking to the Federal Reserve to devaluation and how money works, Noodle has been hooked. Naturally, the noodle wife he’s been with since 2008 was exposed to his new noodle craving.
The passion eventually ended as in 2014, Noodle’s wife took some of the newlyweds’ wedding money to buy Bitcoin. Noodle jokes, “And who knows that bitcoin will then continue to effectively fund IVF — and it’s not cheap!”
The Noodle family has always planned to have children. Unfortunately, due to Ms. Noodle’s medical condition, pregnancy was a challenge. They sought medical advice and soon realized that they might have to undergo fertility treatment:
We struggled for a long time. We’ve never liked the stigma surrounding IVF, which means we’d rather talk about it, and then kind of keep it quiet.”
IVF is a fertility technique in which an egg is removed from a woman’s ovary and fertilized with sperm in a laboratory. The fertilized egg is returned to the woman’s uterus to grow and develop.
The process is time consuming and expensive and its success rate ranges from 4% to 38% depending on various factors. Additionally, as Noodle points out, there is still a stigma associated with IVF treatment, despite it being a regular occurrence in Noodle’s home country, the UK. Follow the pasta:
“The costs behind IVF are astronomical. Most people can’t afford it or go into debt in order to afford it. Some people said, ‘You shouldn’t sell bitcoin; You should have taken out a loan. But I wasn’t ready to be apprehensive about it.”
So Noodle sold some bitcoin. In short, Noodle converted $70,000 north of Bitcoin into government-issued British pounds over the course of a few years. Profits denominated in fiat currency paid for several rounds of IVF treatment for each of his two children, resulting in two healthy babies.
Noodle explained that without Bitcoin, he would likely have taken out a loan to pay for treatment: “Family is important to me, and I would throw anything and everything at it in order to try to make it work. But we were very lucky to have some bitcoin and I haven’t sold it for a long time. “.
Related: UK ‘Bitcoin Adventure’ shows BTC is a family affair
With Bitcoin, Noodle and his wife were able to live out their dream of starting a family, but without debt. As for whether or not there are more little Bitcoin noodles swirling around northwest London, Noodle joked, “I think we’re done with two kids unless the price gets really crazy!”
The Noodle story is part of an upcoming crypto story on Cointelegraph’s Youtube channel. Subscribe here.
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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