But almost anything is better as money than the Bolivar. Gold coins. Dollars. The Mexican peso. Chunks of coal. Eggs. Kalashnikovs. Laundry detergent. It's not exactly an exclusive club.
If you’re in Venezuela it’s hard to get your hands on $5000 USD and convince other people it’s legitimate.
$5000 USD in eggs will go bad before you can trade them all.
$5000 USD in laundry detergent is several truckloads!
Gold coins might be a good option but A) You’d better keep them well protected and B) Why not keep $2500 in gold coins and $2500 in bitcoin?
It used to be the argument for Bitcoin was this vast thing that could fix US Centralized Banking once and for all. And now, your best argument appears to be fixing an inflationary economy run by a dictator.
While it may give people the ability to use a new currency without government approval, at some point a person has to convert a Bolivar to a Bitcoin and back. And a dictator can make most of those conversions illegal, if he so chooses.
So no. Your argument doesn't sway me. Particularly because Brazil went through something similar a few years ago as well and didn't require the use of bitcoin to fix it's inflationary spiral.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/02/458222801/epis...
But most transactions can be done without Bolivars.
> And a dictator can make most of those conversions illegal, if he so chooses.
Dollar conversions in Venezuela (at black market rates) are already illegal, yet they exist.
How did Brazil fix its inflationary spiral, and how does this invalidate Venezuelans using cryptocurrency due to an intransigent government?
> But not all transactions require Bolivars. That is the point.
Only if everyone agrees to not use the Bolivar anymore and say something that everyone has readily access to that can't be counterfeited. At which point you say, "BITCOIN IS THE ANSWER", except it's not because Bitcoin is not easy to obtain. It requires some technical skill, a bank that allows you to make bitcoin transactions, etc.
And even if most transactions no longer require the Bolivar, then using Bitcoin at all is mostly a moot point.
> Dollar conversions in Venezuela (at black market rates) are already illegal, yet they exist. I don’t see your point.
Right, and so if you want to not be thrown in prison you're going to use the Bolivar and not US Currency. The same would be true with Bitcoin if Bitcoin were made illegal.
Can you explain how editing "not all transactions require Bolivars" to "most transactions can be done without Bolivars" is goalpost moving?
> Only if everyone agrees to not use the Bolivar anymore
Not true. People can use the Bolivar for some transactions and not others.
> It requires... a bank that allows you to make bitcoin transactions
What do you mean?
> Right, and so if you want to not be thrown in prison you're going to use the Bolivar and not US Currency.
Not true. Many Venezuelans don't want to be thrown in prison and use US currency, because it's a matter of survival.
> The same would be true with Bitcoin if Bitcoin were made illegal.
What would be true if Bitcoin were made illegal? And where?
Sounds like you’ve got a bone to pick with some ideology I’m not privy to.
And to your point - bitcoin doesn’t need to solve a crisis to be useful! It just needs to be useful to be useful.
Typically the people who shill bitcoin the hardest are the ones with an active stake in it. If this were the stock market, it would be a pump and dump.
Anyway even counterfeit dollars would probably hold their value better than the Bolivar. It's hard enough to print counterfeit money (unless you have the resources of a state) that the supply is probably significantly more constrained than the Bolivar even if a significant portion of the dollars in Venuzuela were counterfeit. Until there's someone pumping out convincing fake dollars as fast as Bolivars are printed you still might be better off holding onto possibly-fake dollars. Even if 70% of your $5k is fake, the remainder won't inflate away like Bolivars will.
I'll grant that Bitcoin are probably better than fake dollars though.
The problem is that the Bolivar is so toxic it's almost radioactive. An exchange wouldn't want to deal with Bolivar's at all, since the price could drop 5% in a day, say.
Even if you could exchange Bolivar cash for black market bitcoins, the black market would have Bolivars to get rid of. And that would manifest itself back into the price of the transaction.
From a recent article (VEF = Venezuelan Bolívar):
>According to Coin Dance, 14,886 Bitcoin have been purchased with VEF on LocalBitcoins between the beginning of 2018 and Aug. 18.
(there's more on the VEF BTC rate here https://dolartoday.com/indicadores/)