Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandelken | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing your point of view.

What is unclear to me, is how these remittances work in practice. I get that in the US you can exchange USD to Bitcoin with a credit card and then send that to a person in, say, Venezuela (or share the wallet password). But how is it converted back to Venezuelan Bolivar? I can't imagine you buying a pizza with bitcoin in Caracas.

Side question, why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive strain for me.

View on HN

I haven't been in Venezuela since 02006 so I don't know how people there cash out of Bitcoin. I'm guessing nobody has a clear view of the whole system, since being transparent to Maduro's thugs is not in the interest of any of the participants. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Venezuelans who are fleeing the country sell their dollars for Bitcoin, and Venezuelans whose family is abroad buy them.

One thing I do know is that a lot of overseas Venezuelans whose remittances are via Bitcoin don't know Bitcoin is involved. They know a storefront where people transmit money to Venezuela, and the guy there tells them where to instruct their family members in Venezuela to pick up the money. How the agent in Venezuela gets paid is no concern of the customers; they only care that the money they give the guy arrives safe and sound.

Thousands of PoS terminals in the country.

https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuelans-can-now-use-bitcoin-to-...

Are you in Venezuela? I notice that that article is about something that was expected to happen, not a report on things that actually have happened... what's the story on the ground?

> why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive strain for me.

Not OP, but I had the same question and did a few seconds of cursory searching to no avail. But rather than cognitive strain, I found it opened up a much larger vista on the perception of time and our seeming place in it. While I am unlikely to adopt it, perhaps the experience would be even broader with a few more zeros tacked on! ;-)

OP probably got the idea to place a leading zero before the year from the Long Now Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

Thank you very much for the pointer!

Relatedly, I like the Human Era notation for expanding the idea of years, where 1 AD is equal to 10,001 HE to denote approximately ten millennia since the start of human cities and agriculture, i.e. civilization. We're living in 12021 HE now.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

https://longnow.org/

> Side question, why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive strain for me.

That's likely a Long Now reference: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com