Some people keep driving with their foreign license, some people use any of the available car sharing services to get around. The good thing is though, that once you passed the knowledge test you’re allowed to drive if someone at the age of 25 who owns a valid driver’s license accompanies you. This should help you to familarize yourself with your new environment and lets you practice for your driving test. For me the whole process took about 3 month and cost 35$.

Note: The US driver’s license is much more than just a license. It’s commonly used for age checks and serves as a valid travel document for domestic flights. Starting October 1st, 2020, boarding domestic flights requires the ownership of a REAL ID driver’s license or ID card. More info on this can be found here.

Finding a job

Even though becoming a US resident doesn’t mean you have to work for a US company or work at all but I assume that most of us need to make a living somehow so getting a job was one of my major concerns. Unfortunately, there’s no general rule of thumb I can provide you with because finding a job is strongly dependent on the industry you are operating in. For me applying through i.e. glassdoor wasn’t successful at all but instead going to Meetups and meeting people in person worked pretty well. I read that only a fraction of available jobs is being posted online and networking is so much more important than I was used to it from Europe. In general, I’d suggest at least 3 months in which one can settle and interview with a lot of companies to find a good job.

Travel

The article is getting quite long already but this is an important part, so bear with me. A big topic is travelling internationally as a resident as you’re supposed to be in the US. Nonetheless, having vacation and staying away for a couple of weeks is usually not an issue. If you can provide documentation that you’re actually living in the US and justify your trip, there’s nothing to worry about even with frequent travels. But if you plan on staying away longer than one year then you must apply for a reentry permit as your permanent resident card becomes technically invalid after this period.

A topic I haven’t covered here is the process of naturalization which means becoming a citizen. As I have yet to explore this myself, I can only point you to the official website.

This was the last part on the topic for now, please reach out if you have any questions or remarks!

In my case this totally didn’t work at all so I needed to reach out to the Social Security Administration (SSA) and manually apply for the card. Also I started to getting appointment notices for the so-called biometrics appointment at the USCIS field office located next to my home address. These notices usually don’t apply for diversity visa recipients as they have their biometrics taken already at the embassys. Even after attending one of the appointments and having my biometrics taken again, I continued receiving these notices which proved my suspicion that something is wrong. I called the USCIS multiple times and was finally able to talk to an immigration officer who didn’t know what was going on with the notices and also not why there’s such a long delay in processing my case (120 days were long overdue at this point).
There was one last hope: The CIS ombudsman. The office of the ombudsman can be consulted for cases which are long overdue or in order to file complaints, etc. Two days after filing my case with them there was an update on my case (the green card has been mailed) and I closed my case with them immediately again which must be a coincidence, but usually this office is a good point of contact.
Just to let you know: Once the physical green card has been sent out, the temporary visa in your passport becomes invalid. I learned it the hard way through second screening in Austin, TX but that’s a different story…

SIM Card

As a German I was shocked about the prices for cellular service of any kind in the US. You can easily pay up to 70$ for unlimited data, text and voice here which is almost double the price of what I’ve been paying back in Germany but anyway… There are four major networks that operate in the US: AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. I’m not going into detail on this any further except for this tiny remark: There’s a difference between GSM and CDMA, so make sure your phone is compatible ;)

Personally, I decided to go with what is called a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO). They share the frequencies of major networks (sometimes even all of them at once, i.e. Google Fi) and usually offer better deals compared to walking into the name brand stores. My MVNO is called Mint and operates on the T-Mobile network. At times, there might be reduced speed if the network is busy since direct T-Mobile customers are preferred over MVNOs but I haven’t experienced it yet and I think it’s fair with regard to the cost benefit. A downside of MVNOs is that they usually have very few or no stores at all, so you need to order it online which can be a little inconvenient especially if you need a phone right from the beginning (i.e. to Uber home from the airport). Be sure to check the coverage maps of the network operator, no matter if MVNO or direct brand as there might be huge differences depending on your area.

Bank Account

One of the first things you probably want to do is opening up a bank account. I’ve been a huge fan of online banks and looked into Simple only to find out that they’re exclusively serving US citizens. So I did some research for comparable offers and finally found Capital One to be a good alternative. They offer a great ATM network, no fees and everything is easily managed through their website or app. There are multiple types of bank accounts one can open but since I’m not here to provide financial advice by any means let’s stick with a traditional Saving’s acccount. Opening up the account is straight-forward online or through one of their very few branches across the country. All you need is an address for shipment of your card, a phone number in your name and your social security number.

If you apply for a credit card right away, you probably will be denied or get a very low limit on it. To build up credit, it’s best to start out with a Secured Credit Card. There’s another possibility if you happen have a credit card from an international operating institution such as American Express already in your home country. They offer to transfer your history with them and issue a new card for the US with comparable conditions as in your home country which simplifies things a lot.

Note: If you try opening up the account right after your arrival, there’s probably no credit history on you in any of the systems they check against. This means they won’t be able to verify that you are an acutal person and this is why you need to have a phone number in your name. I believe the idea is that i.e. if you went to an AT&T store to get a SIM card, they have already seen you in person.

Credit history

You’re new to the country and nobody knows about your spending habits and whether you are a reliable customer or not. Expect huge down payments and/or insane interest rates as companies try to mitigate the risk of you not paying your bills. A common approach to build up your credit without wasting huge amounts of money on interest payments is to buy everything with a credit card and pay it off in full every month prior to doing bigger investments such as getting a car or buying a house (if you can wait that long). Also make sure to put your name on the utility bills of the place where you are staying if possible which also increases your credit.

That’s it for now. I’ll continue in the next part on how to find a job, travel as a resident and much more, stay tuned!

The Environment

I really do care about the environment and I totally agree with all that has been said in this part. Unfortunately, the author only talked about one very well-known consensus algorithm instead of providing the reader with sufficient information on alternatives. He didn’t mention Proof of Stake, a secure and way more environment-friendly protocol (most notably implemented in Ethereum’s Casper Protocol) which would completely undermine his argument. Also, he didn’t take improvements to the Bitcoin network through second-layer protocols such as the Lightening Network into account which would allow vastly more transactions without the need for additional hash power. If you think that’s just a glimpse in the future, you’re mistaken as both solutions are either already deployed on corresponding test networks or even had a first live debut.

Another issue with this part is the made-up number of 80% of nodes being in China and the false claims about where the electricity is coming from. I haven’t found any statistics on which node uses which source of energy, however, I found the acutal node distribution as of Feb, 12th 2018:

Source: Bitnodes

There is also a whole different type of blockchain which is mostly being adopted in enterprises which use different consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) or Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance (RBFT) as described in the Hyperledger Architecture Overview. They all consume tremendously less energy than the Proof of Work mechanism mentioned by the author.

Trust

This was really the part when I decided to clarify things. In my opinion, the line of reasoning in this part is.. let’s put gently: questionable. Blockchain enables trustless computing through it’s various components with the ultimate goal of reaching consensus. The author argues that the trust isn’t actually trust but faith as an algorithm determines it. Even though, technically speaking he’s right, he didn’t describe what the algorithm actually does in order to reach consensus which would give the reader a chance to judge for himself how much trust vs. faith there is. I’m not going to elaborate in much detail on how the transactions are being validated either, but an integral part of it is to check all transactions that led to the sender being capable of sending a transaction at a certain point in time. In other words: Before a transaction can be made, the funds necessary for this transaction are being validated. A technical description can be found in the protocol rules of the Bitcoin Wiki. From my perspective, this has nothing to do with faith.

The next argument was “money -> nodes -> owning the chain” and a presumptious threat if China’s 4 pools would come to an agreement. Well first of all, the referenced article about mining pool distribution is 7 months old which means it’s very much outdated. Just 2 months later, exchanges and pools started to shut down or move to foreign shores due to potential regulation. Second and more importantly, the author puts too much emphasis on the possibility of a 51% attack which even though theoretically possible and technically feasible, the damage caused is in fact comparably small as described here. From an economic perspective this attack can be considered infeasable with just a small gain compared to the effort put into it and an expected sudden decline of the token value if the network is compromised.

In the last paragraph the author refers to “other chains” and an even bigger threat for them to be exposed to the aforementioned attack. Since he’s not stating any specific chain, I can only guess that he means any of the recent super ICO coins. In fact, many of the coins are based on the Ethereum network and are so-called ERC-20 tokens, which would be indeed backed up by the underlying network for the exact reason of not wanting to create a new network, gain traction, build up nodes, etc.

Anyway, on to the next topic..

Security

In this part the author describes the pitfalls of public key cryptography and how it’s always been a challenge to safely store the private key in order to prove ownership. I do agree a lot with what’s been said and yes, storing the key in a safe place is a non-trivial task for non-technical people but for this exact reason there are plenty of wallet types out there to increase usability without compromising security. The latest trend is the rise of so-called hardware wallets, such as Trezor or Ledger Nano S. As stated, it’s not a problem with the technology itself and at some point people need to adjust to these kinds of things in order to reach mainstream adoption. From my perspective, this is mostly the same reason why PGP didn’t reach mainstream adoption even though it should.

Privacy

Florian again only focusses on Bitcoin in this section but generalizes it by saying blockchain. There are alternatives to prevent the mentioned traceability (also called linkability of transactions), such as Monero. Also, off-chain transactions haven’t been considered even though they provide enhanced privacy as they happen in private.

Wrapping it up

In my opinion, the author failed to be concise enough to provide some well researched information on the topic but instead leaves the reader - me - with a lot of questionmarks and unfinished thoughts.

If you have any remarks, please feel free to reach out!

Fast-forward to May the following year, the Department of State will send you an e-mail saying that you’re now able to see the result of the lottery drawing so whether you’ve been selected to move forward with the application or that it didn’t work out this time. In case of the former the real work begins…

Being selected doesn’t necessarily mean you’re able to continue with the application as it depends on your batch number and the amount of visa applications your local embassy can process. So if your batch number is i.e. 65000 it’s very unlikely you can move forward as the application needs to take place during a certain time period (referred to as fiscal year). If you’re unable to have everything processed by the end of the fiscal period, you’ll need to start over which means re-applying for the lottery as your lot is only valid for one fiscal year.

In case you were lucky to have a low lot number, you’ll need to submit a DS-260 form to provide more information on your background, your work experience, qualifications, etc. and again print the confirmation page as you’ll need it to bring to the interview at the embassy. After the Kentucky Consular Center (KCC) reviewed your application (which also includes at which embassy you’re planning to do the interview), the embassy will send you an appointment letter. As the interview preparation is a lengthy, I recommend starting as early as possible to collect all the documents needed. As the list varies depending on the embassy, you should check here.

In my particular case for Germany/Frankfurt, I needed to collect all school reports, police reports, birth certificates, proof of sufficient funds, my passport, a mailing address to send the passport back to and everything else that supports you’re being a solid candidate for becoming a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR). Some of the documents need to be sent in before the appointment and others are fine to bring to the interview (i.e. school reports). Again, this depends highgly on your local embassy, so please check with them if you’ve any doubts what to send in/bring in person. Another very important step is the so-called medical examination which evaluates your physical condition and your history of vaccinations. The thing with the medical exam is that you should take it as close as possible to the interview appointment as its validity is limited to 6 months and thus determines the latest possible entry date to the USA.

An obstacle with this special appointment is that it can only be conducted by certain (very few) doctors and it’s really hard to get an appointment. In Germany, there’re 6 doctors across the country who are certified to do the examination and only one of them allows you to walk in. Luckily, it’s the one in Frankfurt and close to the embassy so what I did was to go to the embassy without having the medical exam taken and thus my visa inquiry rejected (on purpose). The embassy will re-evaluate your endeavor once it has all the necessary documents so I went to the doctor’s office right after the appointment at the embassy and they sent in the results to the embassy so the process continued as usual. Of course I asked the embassy beforehand as my appointment was really early and there was no way I could’ve finished the doctor’s appointment prior to going to the embassy on the same day. Now I just needed to wait for my visa package to arrive and enter the USA prior to the expiration date of my visa stamp (printed in your passport). An important thing to note here is that you just need to hand over the package before the expiration and as soon as you did, the visa stamp serves as your temporary green card for up to 1 year (calculated from the date of arrival). You can immediately leave the country again if you’re not yet ready to move.

A quick note on the costs:

Even though the DV lottery itself is free of charge and please don’t use any of these scam services who charge you to participate on your behalf, the process of getting the visa and later the green card is quite costly (not including the flights).

• Visa application fee: 330$
• Medical examination: approx. 250$
• Green card issuing fee: 165$
• Misc. expenses (police records, etc.): 100$

I’ll continue in the next part to explain how I actually got the physical green card and what else there is to do after your first arrival such as opening a bank account, credit score, employment, travel, etc.

FYI: I applied 3 times until I was lucky. All in-depth information on the process is provided by the Department of State and can be accessed here.