“I looked down at a sea of sunlight and beige and a disappearing black bag with a tail of fiat currency stretching behind it. The bills flitted and danced in the air on their way down, winking at me, tempting me with ‘come hither’ twirls to leap and chase them down. The chopper pilot pleaded with me to stay inside while the guards shouted at each other in incomprehensible babble probably about what to do.”
“’Land the chopper and let’s get as much as we can!’ I screamed over the headphones mic to deafened ears. Helicopters really are quite loud with the doors open. The guards pushed me aside and nudged the chopper mid-air in the process. I felt it would be best to stay still and let them take care of this; do the job I was paying them to do.
“I had no idea what was going to happen next but I knew it wouldn’t be over soon,” said Ruskov, my Eastern European friend. You see, Ruskov (not his real name), is a bona fide Bitcoin whale. He recently went on a trip to Iran which sent him to all sorts of unusual and unexpected places on routes yet unheard of yet to most in search of Bitcoin arbitrage.
—-
In January, the mounting yet unrequited crisis between the Iranian government and the United States of America saw a sudden, pronounced, inaccurately rumored incongruence in the price of Bitcoin within Iran and outside of Iran. While the price of Bitcoin, for example, jumped to around $24,000 per Bitcoin in Iran, it hovered around $8700 around the rest of the world. There is no doubt as to the price disparity as we now have first-hand evidence of it.
Well, any self-respecting and self-identified whale wouldn’t pass up this selling opportunity, so Ruskov bought as much BTC as he could and went on a journey to the middle east in order to unload his stack. In the meantime, he was creating one of the most intriguing arbitrage stories I had ever heard. So we met one night over drinks where he regaled us in a gentrified corner of a liquor-laden far eastern-style restaurant all of the details that led him to the moment when he nearly lost it all.
The story begins in the quiet-enough edge of the eastern world where the juxtaposition of megacities and barren countryside has an irony that is not lost on the locals who are trying to grasp with what has happened to their world in the past 50 years. Ruskov, being a whale, has little to do all day but whale things like checking his wallet balance and eavesdropping on Arthur Hayes. He also happens to keep a close eye on major geopolitical events like the one that hastened the spike of the price of Bitcoin in Iran early this year. Spoken in a light yet clearly discernible eastern European accent, Ruskov delighted us by explaining just how dirty Bitcoin trading can make someone.
“When news of the strike at Baghdad International Airport hit the rounds on major news outlets, I knew I had to do something about it. I thought, ‘something is going to come from this and I will kick myself if I don’t profit from it. Luckily it was about time for me to make a trip out of the country anyway so as I was watching things unfold as quickly as they did, my wife acquiesced to my travels without any questions. I began to pack my bags, still not sure exactly where I would be going, but with an idea that I should head through Russia.
You see, Ruskov is from a non-descript country somewhere in the east of Europe and the west of Russia, of hearty stock and upbringing where luck ensured extraordinary wealth or loss and hard work ensured relative mediocrity. His outlook on the world remains cynical. His world has for most of his life consisted of close calls; he demonstrated his mastery of slipping through the cracks by turning a measly $20,000 initial investment into untold sums. The sums can be whispered but hardly proclaimed since he, like any responsible whale, does all but indicate his status in the community and dresses the part to fit in with us. His decision-making process is informed largely by his background.
“It is such a vivid memory. I saw the price of Bitcoin in Iran shoot up to over $20k and I knew my destination. Obviously I couldn’t just fly in direct because that’s not really possible when every missile in the region is pointed upward, so I had to devise another way to get in there. I’ve been playing DOTA for years. I mean it feels like decades. There is a guy in Russia who started playing DOTA around the same time I did. We became friends on the game and still to this day play online together and share notes. He is a great guy and happens to have several contacts in the border crossing community. I knew he would know the path of least resistance into Iran without flying.
“Sure I know, Sergei from DOTA said in what can only be presumed to be as thick a Russian accent as has ever been heard, No no, you can’t just fly in. You have to get in through Azerbaijan after taking plane to Russia. Can you get to Russia’ He asked. I affirmed. Great, then you have to get into Russia and meet up with my guy at the border of Azerbaijan. I’ll set it up and get you through the border at Azerbaijan, but you have to make your arrangements to get to that meeting point.
“I thanked him and immediately started booking the flights I could. With my bag already packed it was fairly easy to just hop in a taxi and get to the airport so off I went kiss kiss goodbye honey and I’ll see you in a few days after I visit whoever it is I said I was going to visit.”
“Oh, there was so much to do!” He sipped his shot and became noticeably anxious at this point. It very well could have been the alcohol and in fact, it probably was, but for the sake of the narrative we have to assume that it was the sensitive information he was divulging.
“The first thing I needed to do was arrange for guards to escort me around Iran. I would be insane to try to conduct this sort of business without armed guards at my side, right? So I looked up a few websites and reviewed the forums for recommendations until I found the ones I wanted. They came highly recommended and for the price would provide-
I stopped him there to reiterate what he was saying: that he was hiring armed guards to escort him from the border of Azerbaijan through Iran. Furthermore, that there are actual online markets for these armed guards and forums where people discuss their experiences with them in a market-friendly way the same way you might see conversations about a new graphics card for a PC.
“Right. Of course those things exist. People absolutely need them in some countries, not worst of them being Iran. Just imagine walking around with stacks of cash or guns or drugs or whatever else it is you want to carry around in bulk without allowing someone to come and snatch right away from you. Iranian police won’t stop them, I mean, I read that a lot of these guys are or were police anyway so why would the police stop them? Anyway I got in contact with them and offered to pay in cash and told them I would be coming from Azerbaijan and that I didn’t know where exactly I would be arriving in Iran. It’s funny because they knew Sergei and they also knew exactly where I would be coming into Iran as if this happens all the time.”
“Then I needed to be sure that I was going the right way when I arrived in Russia for my first rendezvous, so I bought a few disposal phones which are surprisingly hard to find in some countries. I made sure to load the numbers I needed onto them just in case something were to go wrong with my main phones. These phones needed to show me location at least by way of telling me what city I was in too. I’ve never been through Azerbaijan, so I wanted to be able to trace my footprints somehow. Can’t be too trusting with these DOTA types, after all.”
He said with a straight face and took another sip.
“In all honesty I hadn’t really brought any bags with me other than a backpack. I knew I wouldn’t be there for more than a day or two if everything went right. It wouldn’t make sense for me to travel heavy anyway, what with this basically being illegal and all. Need to have fast legs in case things get sticky.”
“So I landed in Russia and transfered through to Azerbaijan in Baku. It really is a beautiful city if you’ve never been. You should check it out right on the Caspian Sea. Quite breathtaking. But quite frankly I will never go back there if I can help it only because of the memories I now have imprinted on my brain from this trip. I got off the plane and marched through the relative shambles of an airport in a car that had been arranged for me. There was a guy smoking a huge cigar wearing big aviators and sandals in the airport standing there with ‘Sergei’ written on a big board. I stood for a bit wondering if that was for me. No one approached him for some time so I did. Oh and the sign was upside down.”
“[Are you here to pick up Sergei?] I asked him in Russian.”
[No I came from Sergei… Um well I must be your driver then. Do you need to know my name?] Before I could answer he turned and gestured for me to follow him in his smoke cloud.”
“I wondered about his sandals but I also wondered how he could see since he was driving nearly laying down in the car while I sat in the back seat. We drove on what I can only assume was the fastest route from Baku to the border because we were there in about 2 hours. At this point it was about 10am and I was starting to realize that my ‘day in Iran’ was going to be ‘a day and a few hours in Iran.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that in general, but these were extenuating circumstances that would make it better for me to get in and out as quickly as possible.”
“We made it near the border when this guy suddenly veered off the road in his Gremlin-like capsule car that rocked violently as we attempted to traverse the off-road terrain. Clearly this was not the best way to ride in this car. We did this for about 10 minutes when he stopped, barked the first words he had said since the airport [get out] and out we went.”
“There it wasn’t exactly desert, but it was hot as hell and I saw no one around. I wondered if he was just there to finish me off for good and cleanse me of my sins in as dishonorable a way as he could see fit until he waved and pointed behind me.”
“[You go with them.] Then he belched a final cloud of smoke as a twisted salutation (he was still smoking the same cigar I think) and went on his way. At that moment I had a flash of clarity or an epiphany or whatever it is called when one can see clearly a vision, whether completely imaginary or true in any capacity, of water. Then it dawned on me that I was quite thirsty. It’s amazing how the arousal of our senses arouses our body’s needs first. I imaged jetskis, yachts, and large ships that I had seen in the Caspian earlier that day and how wet it all was. How I could be there until my focus returned to more immediate matters, such as ensuring that my pick-up wouldn’t accidently clip me on his way out since he couldn’t actually see out of his windshield.”
“Anyway, the whole thing was so surprisingly organized. I couldn’t believe the efficiency with which it all happened but I admired it every step of the way. After all, if you knew how much I was paying for all of this, you would likely expect it to happen this way… Honestly you’d be surprised how incompetent people can be at any price point.”
“So I trudged through this semi-desert under an azure sky towards a black SUV flanked by two AK-47’s attached to two men. They told me to get in and that was that.-“
He stopped the story to field a question from our crew about where he was going to next. The best way to answer the question was with more alcohol which we from that point on just told the owner to keep coming. She winked and gestured to her employees that we were not to be bothered with simple questions anymore, that perhaps a story of international intrigue and what can only be the types of stories that may be partially legal to utter at all were occupying the air around our corner of the establishment. Lucky for us it was unlikely anyone there would understand what we were saying.
“This is where it started to get like the movies…”
To be continued
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