Yesterday I went to a "cueva" - informal money exchanges in the streets of Buenos Aires. A guy told me the address. A jewelry dealer he said. It was a store front with an all opaque window except for three little boxes featuring three pieces of jewelry. The door was locked and had a button. I pressed the button and was let in and found myself in a tiny entrance, a gated window to my right and another locked door ahead. I was let in again. Inside people were busy counting bills, I actually did see gold jewelry and a young guy sitting at a table was busy slicing silver for another client. Or at least he was clipping strips of some silver color metal sheet. Others came in and left with bags full of bills - near worthless bills of 1000 or 2000 Argentinian Pesos or $1US to $2US.

It was my turn. As they had a big neon Bitcoin sign with the Bitcoin price in USD, I assumed it would be smooth sailing and said I'd like to sell some sats, please. The young guy quoted me a price - a 3% markup - but only wanted stable coin USD. I insisted I don't have that and he asked what wallet I was using - maybe to check if it had a swap to USDt option or something and I kept insisting that I only had BTC and would rather not show him my app (Yeah, Phoenix, please let me hide my balance from the main screen, please). He referred me to another guy in the room and they both were giggling about that hodler they had here.

That's where I felt really not very secure. Around me 3 guys I had to assume were best friends, with two locked door separating me from any public audience. In the end they gave me 400 bills of 500ARS and I asked if they don't have at least the 1k bills. He just smiled and said "it's all yours". Needless to say I was not comfortable counting 400 bills right there, so I left with a stack-of-bills sized paper bag and waited some 10 long minutes for an Uber.