A short story in using crypto from this side of the world (and why I love BCH more now)

So, a friend and I had this experience about 6 hours ago. Sorry in advance for the descent into madness. TL;DR at bottom of this post.

Said friend asked me to help with his first crypto purchase as the vendor he was looking to buy from somewhere in Europe only accepted EUR/GBP fiat, and BTC/ETH/Cardano. He settled on Cardano to pay for, because it turned out to be the cheapest option. I foolishly agreed to walk him through the process. We immediately ran into 3 problems:

1. We're from Malaysia, so it's not exactly a country where crypto comes cheap (literally a 4:1 exchange rate). Using a credit card would've incurred an additional 8% surcharge for both fiat and crypto payments.

2. Almost everywhere we looked up didn't allow us to withdraw Cardano, only to trade. We weren't allowed to pay for it even. Thought it was a browser issue, so we tried multiple browsers, same result.

3. Because of the purchase attempts being in EUR/USD, we kept on having to play a guessing game of "how much is enough" with our foreign exchange rates before the volatile price of Cardano jumped or dipped.

   ---

We spent well over 3 hours trying to figure out how to buy Cardano just to pay a European vendor for one measly item. Yes, I know it was dumb. I have no excuse except that we had invested too many brain cells in figuring out how to do something that would've been easier if we just sucked it up and paid with a credit card from the very beginning.

The upshot of the whole mess was when we discovered Coingate allowing us to exchange BCH for ADA.

Finally!

I simply loaded up my Bitcoin.com wallet, scanned the QR code, and paid for the ADA within two minutes. It took another 2 hours for Coingate to confirm the payment and release the Cardano we bought. And now, here I sit, with mental fatigue and a bruised ego, but with a satisfied friend who now owes me $121 and dinner.

I also cursed out loud that all of this could've been easily solved if the vendor simply accepted BCH too.

TL;DR: Friend wanted to buy an item with Cardano, I helped. We both suffered through the process.

Time spent trying to buy ADA: 3+2 hours

Time spent paying for the ADA with BCH (with confirmation): 2 minutes

Ego: bruised but intact

Brain cells lost: too many

Thanks for reading, and hope you had a laugh as much as my friend did.