Home sweet hodl: How a Bitcoiner used BTC to buy his mom a house

cointelegraph.com:

There’s a special bond between mothers and their sons. For pseudonymous Alan, a 28-year-old engineer, a Bitcoin (BTC) loan helped his mom to buy a house.

Alan told Cointelegraph that he took out a Bitcoin-backed loan in 2021 — serendipitously on his sister’s birthday — to gift his mom the tax-free money. She then used the funds to buy a house in North Yorkshire, England, while Alan kept his Bitcoin.

Alan first used Bitcoin in 2012, learning it was a useful currency to buy things on the internet. He used the peer-to-peer (P2P) service localbitcoins.com, whose team are regular Cointelegraph contributors, to buy Bitcoin.

Alan described the process of buying Bitcoin from real people as a “bizarre experience.” He explained that the experience 10 years ago is incomparable to using popular exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken or Binance nowadays.

Over the course of his studies at university, Alan’s interest in Bitcoin waxed and waned until 2014 came round and the “less than 100 pounds,” or $130, that Alan had in Bitcoin had become a “couple of grand.” Alan explains the “transition” of Bitcoin the currency into something more:

Hodling onto Bitcoin over the long-term might make sense, as the P2P money created by Satoshi Nakomoto could be an investment tool or a store of value.

Fast forward to 2016, and the price per Bitcoin was around $753, or 600 pounds. Alan knew that it was “something worth buying,” but Alan was still a student and had his head down for exams:

Alan spoke to his dad, suggesting it might be worth “investing a couple of thousand” into the orange coin. Unfortunately, his father did not invest in 2016, but Alan hodled on.

The 2017 Bitcoin bull run swung around, and the price per Bitcoin reached almost $20,000. At the