Dante Castiglione stalked through the doors of a glass-walled office tower on the edge of downtown Buenos Aires, just a few hundred feet from the old port district. In the crowded elevator, he shook his head and muttered under his breath about the stresses of the day and his profession. “I swear, this job can kill me,” he said, his eyes cast downward.
On the 20th floor, he hustled into an impersonal, windowless office and quickly removed the tools of his trade from his backpack and set them on the desk: locked blue cash box, cellphone and clunky Dell laptop with the same yellow smiley-face sticker that he puts on all his electronics. Then he unbuckled the fanny pack from around his waist, which contained the most important part of his business: bricks of $100 bills and 100-peso notes.
This room, rented for the day, was not one of Castiglione’s regular haunts. He mostly drifts among the old cafes in Buenos Aires, where the bow-tie-wearing waiters serve small glasses of seltzer water with each coffee. In his line of business as a money-changer, temporary meeting places are preferred; they make things harder for would-be thieves, whom he has so far avoided. On this Friday in late February, Castiglione had run around the city in his camouflage-patterned sandals, trying to distribute cash to some clients and pick it up from others. Once back in his temporary office, his outdated LG phone alternately chirped, buzzed and sang with incoming text messages and emails.
Ordinarily, Castiglione would have help. His 18-year-old daughter, Fiona, often deals with customers, but she was about to give birth to her first child. Her twin brother, Marco, who used to make cash runs, was now focusing on school. So Castiglione was alone, his stress evident in the sweat on his forehead and the agitation on his face. When his business partner, who lives in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, called to ask why he hadn’t taken care of one particularly insistent client, Castiglione erupted in frustration.
“If you want it done faster, you pick up the phone and call her yourself,” he growled in Spanish, before switching to another call.
After hanging up, he told me in English: “Everybody wants everything now, and I am just trying to do it. I’m not magical, as people think.”
Magical, no, yet something new all the same. His occupation is one of the world’s oldest, but it remains a conspicuous part of modern life in Argentina: Calle Florida, one of the main streets in downtown Buenos Aires, is crowded day and night with men and women singing out “cambio, cambio, cambio, casa de cambio,” to serve local residents who want to trade volatile pesos for more stable and transportable currencies like the dollar. For Castiglione, however, money-changing means converting pesos and dollars into Bitcoin, a virtual currency, and vice versa.
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