Editing Blog/2024-02-27/Teenage Entrepreneurship (section)

== Dollar Purchase Power ==

[[File:IOB Visa Debit Card.png|thumb|alt=A picture of an Indian Overseas Bank Debit card, served through visa. It has the number and validity period redacted.|My Visa debit card, hopefully sufficiently redacted]]

[[File:SBI Maestro Debit Card.png|thumb|alt=A picture of a State Bank of India Maestro Debit card. The number and dates are redacted.|A picture of my Maestro Debit Card, suitably redacted, one hopes]]

Now it's one thing to be a strong currency, but the greatest thing about anyone who could supply dollars is that they had a variety of ways to supply dollars to someone for goods and services. I had rupees, and a debit card with a VISA logo on it, and I even had another debit card with a Mastercard (well Maestro) logo on it.

But despite all the stuff that says "International" on any of these and "For Online Use", at the time they were very limited in where they would work. I remember trying repeatedly to buy things on non-Indian sites, hitting [[wikipedia:3D Secure|3D Secure]] or whatever and being unable to buy the thing.

So the ''most'' valuable reason to have dollars was that you could buy things online that were not in India. This meant random cables that, for some reason, we couldn't easily get in India or little electronics that just weren't convenient to acquire because I didn't know how to evaluate quality. And most importantly of all, it meant buying many things at US prices (which were ridiculously cheap in comparison to the converted rate). The thing I coveted above all was a domain name of my own. And one day, I did actually get it ([[arjie.com]]) with some online winnings, and then renewed with dollars from these online endeavours.