The Economist talks about mining bitcoin in Venezuela being profitable due to government-subsidized electricity.
> Venezuela is the cheapest place to mine bitcoin in the world. Miners are arbitraging, buying an underpriced commodity (electricity) and converting it to bitcoin for a profit.
On the other hand, this article tries to claim that large numbers of Venezuelans are using Bitcoin as a currency, saying things like:
> Eventually, the people of Venezuela landed on bitcoin, the only currency that is censorship-free and digital, which cannot be confiscated or restricted by the Venezuelan government.
This claim is unsupported by the Economist article. It also conveniently omits the conclusion of the Economist article:
> President Nicolás Maduro does not like bitcoin miners, and the government’s ownership of the electrical grid enables it to locate, and crack down on, those using the unusually high amounts of electricity that bitcoin mining requires. There are no laws regarding cryptocurrencies, so targets have been arrested on spurious charges such as energy theft. Mining equipment has been seized by officials, some of which was then used for their own gain. While bitcoin can protect from the tyranny of governments printing money, other kinds of tyranny remain unchecked.
[1] https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/04/e...
Bitcoin is a lifeline for citizens and residents of Venezuela.
It actually does seem harmful to frame “pro-crypto” in those unlikely terms. Or in other words, how does inventing an abstraction layer on top of your original failed currency, obtained by burning fossile fuels, help the average Venezuelan trying to buy food and sundries? It seems more like slapping a bandaid on a sucking chest wound and claiming that you’ve helped the patient.
I’m not interested in the “crypto space” and what it needs, especially in a discussion of an article purporting to describe what the people of Venezuela need. Unless those two things overlap to the degree that it’s a “lifeline” for those people, it reeks of the usual pumping of cryptocurrency that seems to pervade the “space” in question.
Bmelton: Between the distortion of the original Economist article used in this article, and this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16783272
I’d say that’s not what this is about. This currency is just a laundry for dollar bills.
Moreover, we know that in currency crises, black and gray markets spring up like wildfire, so it takes even less imagination to picture a proprietor starting to prefer crypto currencies in exchange for tangible goods vs. the already bad -- and more importantly, still declining local currency.
Despite the volatility of crypto currencies, and the fact that they've been on a hard slide lately, it's still a better depreciation than hanging on to Bolivars.