TO HODL or have children? IVF Bitcoin Babies paid with BTC profits

by · October 14, 2022

Keep Bitcoin until the end or sell some to start a family? For a Bitcoiner in west London, it was easy.

Noodle, (a nickname) a Brit who first heard of Bitcoin around 2012, took profits from his Bitcoin purchases to pay for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment for his wife. He told Cointelegraph that he has “no regrets” about his decision to start a family using fiat-denominated profits from buying, holding and then selling Bitcoin.

Noodle first found out about Bitcoin in late 2012, when one Bitcoin was worth about $13.

“I was at the gym and I was chatting with this guy who I get on well with. We talked in the dressing rooms and it’s funny because he tried to explain this Silk Road thing to me – which was on the dark web.”

The now-defunct marketplace Silk Road was a place where early Bitcoin users could buy and sell pretty much anything using Bitcoin as their internal currency. At the time, Noodle didn’t necessarily reject Bitcoin despite the recommendation from his gym buddy, but it passed him by until a close friend explained how to buy cannabis with Bitcoin on the Silk Road.

The Silk Road was a popular site for buying and selling just about anything using Bitcoin.

Once his close friend had explained that they might be able to use Bitcoin to buy real-world items, Noodle was convinced:

“And I thought Let’s do it… So we bought seven Bitcoins and at the time – they were $57 a pop.”

The price of Bitcoin has since risen almost 400 times higher, to a market value of $20,000 in 2022. Speaking to Noodle in 2013, he explained that Bitcoin was actually quite difficult to obtain – it was “a really convoluted process”. However, he persevered and managed to obtain Bitcoin to purchase goods. Unknowingly, Noodle had also stumbled down the rabbit hole and his Bitcoin journey had just begun.

When the weeds came, I was all the way down the rabbit hole, like I was watching everything. I never thought I would have any interest in fiscal policy, in macroeconomic outlook, etc – any of this!

For Noodle, Bitcoin opened his eyes to finance, education and a whole world of new information. From fractional reserve banking to the Federal Reserve to currency depreciation and how money works, Noodle was hooked. Naturally, Noodle’s wife, who he had been dating since 2008, fell victim to Noodle’s newfound passion.

The passion eventually faded, when in 2014 Noodle’s wife took some of the newlyweds’ wedding money to buy Bitcoin. Noodle jokes, “And who would know […] that that Bitcoin would then go on to effectively fund IVF – which isn’t bloody cheap!”

The Noodle family had always planned to have children. Unfortunately, due to Mrs. Noodle’s medical condition, conceiving was a challenge. They sought medical advice and soon realized they might need to undergo fertility treatment:

– We struggled for a long time. We’ve never liked the stigma around IVF, which means we prefer to talk about it, then keep it a bit quiet.”

IVF is a fertility technique where an egg is removed from the woman’s ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a laboratory. The fertilized egg is returned to the woman’s uterus to grow and develop.

The process is time consuming, expensive and has a success rate of 4% to 38% depending on various factors. Additionally, as Noodle alluded to, there is still a stigma attached to IVF treatment, despite it being a common occurrence in Noodle’s home country of the UK. Noodle continued:

“The costs behind IVF are astronomical. Most people can’t afford it, or they go into debt to afford it. Some people said ‘you shouldn’t sell Bitcoin; you should have gotten a loan. But I wasn’t prepared to be so piggish about it.”

So Noodle sold some Bitcoin. In total, Noodle converted north of $70,000 in Bitcoin into government-issued pounds sterling over the course of a few years. The fiat-denominated profits paid for several rounds of IVF treatment for both of his children that resulted in two healthy babies.

Without Bitcoin, Noodle explained that he probably would have taken out a loan to pay for the treatment: “Family is important to me and I would have thrown anything and everything at it to try to make it work. But we were very lucky we had some Bitcoin and I didn’t sell it for a long time.”

Related: The British “Bitcoin Adventure” shows that BTC is a family affair

With Bitcoin, Noodle and his wife could live out their dream of starting a family, but debt-free. As for whether there could be more Bitcoin baby noodles running around north-west London soon, Noodle joked: “I think we’re done with two kids unless the price goes super crazy!”

Noodle’s story is part of an upcoming crypto story on Cointelegraph’s Youtube channel. Subscribe here.