I am in Bulgaria and, for those unaware, the Euro is coming and, quite frankly, I'm already sick of it.
For at least a few years I've been reading about it, and Bulgaria was always failing to meet some criteria, but the final phase is here. People have protested, lots of noise has been made, but as usual, the plebs will be shafted.
Every day, I see debates about it, people arguing on Facebook if it's good or bad, and then the endless media pieces about how it's either going to explode real estate prices or kill them. Endless experts going back and forward.
The real estate agents, the vultures they are, are having a field day spreading FUD about how the Euro will explode prices, and people are trying to smash buy flats for fear that it will then become expensive.
Meanwhile, what I can say anecdotally is this: places are already using the Euro as an excuse to raise prices, and they are probably doing it so that they don't get accused of price gouging after the Euro arrives.
Here, I can't blame the Euro per se, but it's a good pretext to hike prices. The Leva (Bulgarian currency) is already pegged to the Euro anyway, so I don't see what kind of amazing benefits it will confer to the average person.
Case in point, my haircut has cost 14 leva (about 7 euros) for almost a decade. 6 months ago, the price had been increased to 20 leva (10 euro), and the most recent hair cut was 30 Leva - 15 euro).
I don't care really, it's not a lot, but it's the same little bit of increasing everywhere. In percentage terms, it's quite a jump. If I treated my clients like this, I wouldn't bloody have any left!
My kids school fees are going up 10%, and it looks like other schools are also doing 10% - every year prior they have increased 5% and, while I can't prove it, this feels like a 'fuck you' tax.
As a result, I'm moving the kids to state schools and if it's shit, I'll home school them, not like the educatuon quality is amazing anyway.
On top of this, I'm sure things will get more expensive because they have done every single time the Euro was introduced, whether from greed, or just rounding up decimal places. Experts sitting there smugly saying how the gov will be on top of it all and whatnot is pure waffle. The gov here, like in many places, is shit and will do nothing, all they;re good for is raising taxs and trying to dig themselves out of the fiat debt-pit they created themsevels.
So yeah, it does make me a bit sad, just something else to be forced on people, rules for us, not for them.
Still, this is why we stack, and I quite often take great joy in knowing that I am building my non-KYC stack safely away from the legacy bank systems
