I like to travel solo. Intentionally low budget and no plans. If I want to stay in a spot, I stay, if I want to move, I move. It's epic, but if you travel alone, all of the responsibility is on you. If you mess up, no one will correct your mistakes.
It's just like Bitcoin where you alone are responsible for all of your actions. As a reward, you'll get the ultimate freedom.
March 2022: I travel through the north coast of Colombia. After a week of living on the beach, a power surge (probably) fried my laptop. It died on spot.
Later in March: I lost my only credit card. Annoying but I can function just with the phone.
April 5th: After a marvelous day at the beach, I'm walking with some friends back to the town. Someone stops for a tea. I don't want it, so I just sit on the curb and enjoy a cig. I probably took my phone out of pocket and forgot it there or someone snatched it.
After 10 or so minutes, we came back to the hostel and with absolute horror, I noticed it finally happened, I lost my phone. My only device.
Adrenaline fueled, I ran back, looking everywhere, asking around, got a stranger to help me and call my number. It rang for some while but nobody picked up. That phone is worth a month of cheap life there if sold well…
I returned to the hostel and convinced a dude there (interhuman trust ftw) to let me log in to my password manager through his laptop and to try to locate my phone with Google. No luck. Can't connect.
Before I departed on this trip I was thinking about what would happen if this exact thing happened to me, to not lock myself out of everything.
I'm using random passwords everywhere, so I can't access anything unless I'm in my password manager. I also have a 2FA activated. Which, got lost with my phone. This would be a total nightmare, but thankfully I had backup code written on a piece of paper in my wallet which I didn't lose.
Tip 1: Carry offline backups!
In a stroke of "luck", I ran out of cash the same night. So here I am, cashless, cardless and phoneless. My brain is crunching numbers and calculating my options. Wtf do I do?
Tip 2: Carry a cash reserve!
There is a service I knew in Colombia about which exchanges BTC for pesos. But for that I needed to get to by BTC. So I have asked the same helpful awesome dude to help me recover my Bitcoin Lightning wallet on his phone. It was super easy and in just few minutes I had my funds at hand.
I had to exchange sats for LTC and exchange those for pesos. This exchange sent to the hostel owner where I stayed.
I managed to pay for my stay and got enough cash to buy an old (most likely stolen) smartphone to recover my accounts and wallets. Most of the Bitcoin wallets were easy to recover. However, I cant access Bitcoin Beach wallet cos it is connected to my phone number which I also lost with the phone.
Muun, Phoenix, Blue, Wallet of Satoshi, Exodus - easy recovery.
Simple Bitcoin Wallet gets a 3/5 stars, because there is no automatic recovery. You need access to your previous device to get your channel backups. I had multiple channels with various nodes and I had to close them all and reopen. Just some time and a few thousand sats lost.
For some reason I can't recover Blixt wallet at all. Some of my sats still sit there.
My shitcoin (fiat) banking app needs my, now lost, phone number to function so I'm "locked out" of those until I get a new SIM with the old number.
Did I learn to be more careful about my stuff? No.
But I learned few other things:
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Bitcoin rules, fiat sucks
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have offline backups when traveling
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have cash reserve (I know, fiat smells)
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all my actions to get cash were trusted. I trusted a service and multiple people not to scam me. Communism works well in a small group of good people.
If you like to travel light, don't burden yourself with ties to the fiat banking system, opt out and fly free.
Fin.