Visit the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. The place is packed with dozens of tiny crypto exchange houses, along with fiat exchange houses and gold and silver shops.
It's a little heaven of open decentralized exchange.
127 sats \ 0 replies \ @m4 30 Jul 2022
Sounds like a tale from thousand and one nights :)
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @cointastical 30 Jul 2022
Here is a list that is a subset of the physical places you can buy bitcoin.
Physical Stores where you can Buy or Sell bitcoin
https://cointastical.github.io/Physical-Locations-Bitcoin
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206 sats \ 0 replies \ @sb 30 Jul 2022
This is so interesting! I envisage a future in which such Lightning bazaars pop up in cities all over the world. No KYC, micropayments for Fiat, precious metals, local food etc.
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110 sats \ 2 replies \ @cointastical 30 Jul 2022
Back in 2014 after Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam I spent a day in Istanbul. At the conference I had used a bitcoin ATM for the first time, bought a Coinkite card, and saw so much I was even more certain that bitcoin's March to gaining mass adoption was in high gear at that point, especially for developing countries. (I was wrong on the timing as a two year bear market had just begun, but I digress).
Anyway I had tried to gauge bitcoin awareness by asking at the various foreign currency exchanges I happened across if I could convert bitcoin to lira. I even had a Casascius coin to show (one intact but also one peeled to show how bitcoin works, by use of a private key to spend). Asked a couple merchants if they would accept bitcoin or even if they heard of it.
My hopium balloon got totally deflated. Nobody had heard of it, nobody except my taxi drivers were even interested in hearing more about it, and few I spoke with had smartphones so I couldn't even help them become bitcoiners by giving a little bitcoin away to them after they installed mycelium wallet or similar.
Had I known at the time the right way to communicate on bitcoin is to describe it as a savings technology rather than a payment method and bridge between fiat currencies, I think I might have done better towaeds solving the problem that was the main catalyst that eventually gave bitcoin a good amount of traction there.
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125 sats \ 1 reply \ @pillar OP 30 Jul 2022
You can come back now and scratch your itch :)
Besides the exchanges houses, I also saw a couple of stores with "Bitcoin accepted here signs". They where mainly small, luxury items stores (jewelry, watches, etc). Although I'm not sure if that was truly to date, since current regulation in Turkey forbids using cryptocurrencies for commercial transactions
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200 sats \ 0 replies \ @cointastical 30 Jul 2022
Some day, I hope to!!
That's really unfortunate. In another country where a similar ban exists, I know some freelancers who are paid in bitcoin. They know which merchants they can spend at -- even though there's no pin on CoinMap.org for them nor any "bitcoin accepted" signage in the shop. So bitcoin continues to be used just that it isn't advertised.
There is another place I've been where the hotel concierge knew offhand nearly a dozen restaurants and tourist spots where bitcoin was accepted. Here too there was no "bitcoin accepted" advertising or anything, just word of mouth.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @blocktock 30 Jul 2022
Thanks for sharing. Would love to see a video. Certainly runs contrary to the mainstream perception that Turkey is on its last legs. Never doubt ingenuity.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @takaponka 30 Jul 2022
Rates and liquidity are okay ?
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @pillar OP 30 Jul 2022
Haven't tried so I can't tell. But for fiat exchange, rates are great and buy/sell spread is under 1%. It's highly competitive since there are dozens of places within a 5min walk radius, so if one of the exchanges gets greedy customers quicky jump to the store next door.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @lv99_slacker 30 Jul 2022
If there was something like this in my city, I might buy some as a novelty, but, overall, I don't have any interest in transacting bitcoin physically.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @go 30 Jul 2022
Great tip
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