I am a 52 year old latinamerican woman that has traveled a lot and speaks 3 languajes, I studied computer engineer 25 years ago, came to Barcelona on vacations without finishing my degree´s thesis and realized that here I was safe and decided to stay.
I´ve owned a restaurant in Barcelona for the past 17 years and also owned a small yarn shop in gracia for 4 years that I had to close it because of COVID.
I have witnessed this past years as a business owner how we have lost control of our finances, our data and our privacy to big centralized corporations and governments.
Since the end of the pandemia, when cash slowly dissapeared, I noticed that still almost 90% of all retail payments are made with debit/credit cards, first arguing that cash was a health hazard, then because its easy. This means that for every € paid in retail shops, we give a % to some private finantial institution with extremely wealthy people on the board of directors, same finantial institutions that we rescued in 2008 and have not paid anything back.
The distribution of wealth has been polarized even more because of it and has left most of us at the mercy of big centralized corporations, banks and with little or no power to negotiate public policies with governments.
So, I started studying alternative ways of paying retail, from local barter with neighbors, to local coin, and the answer was the electronic cash or crypto.
In my quest to understand it, I fell into the rabbit hole really quick, first with learnweb3, then with alchemy university, and finally realizing that I needed to take it very seriously I entered Barcelona 42 to brush up on my programming skills which were very rusty.
So I am still rusty, learning slowly, but very convinced that the future is web3 and I don´t want to miss it. I really want to expand the possibility of paying retail with crypto as much as possible.