I think removing embargos would help more than a volatile cryptocurrency.
[edit, and while I'm in here] And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the worlds 25th largest automaker decided it was a bad medium of exchange for buying electric cars.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in Venezuela, they decided to go the other way, dollarizing. They moved 66% of all transactions to the USD, forcing the Maduro government's hand, and leading to their major banks offering USD deposit accounts. [1]
If anything they need USDC not BTC. This is just gambling in a regulatory and legal void. The Mad Max of finance.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/venezuela...
You don't need to transact on-chain (i.e. settlement layer). There's a lightning network, where transactions are instantaneous, and fees are a few satoshis.
It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist.
> And why did it drop 50% in a month? Because the worlds 25th largest automaker decided it was a bad medium of exchange for buying electric cars.
That wasn't the main reason. It was the China FUD and the lack of Grayscale's neutral arbitrage, which took out the biggest buyer off of the market.
Sure, however LN is not sufficient because it requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel. To open a channel for everyone on earth would cost up to a third of a trillion dollars and take over 75 years, plus or minus deaths and births. Like getting a phone line in the Soviet Union. Further, complexity of routing is quadratic and will quickly exceed our patience.
> It's amusing how most Bitcoin critics focus on on-chain fees and pretend that lightning doesn't exist.
Well, that's because the underlying that LN is strapped to is so incredibly inefficient LN is a rounding error at the limit.
Not with the upcoming[1] "channel factories"[2].
[2] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-c...
LN has always been a "but wait! we've got a solution just around the corner - please don't give up!" feature - but there's nothing around the corner. There never has been. Not to mention it does nothing to address the quadratic routing criticism.
If I understand correctly the maximum number of people involved in a channel factory creation is the same as the maximum number of keys involved in a multi-signature transaction. The limit is currently 15 or 20[1] but with Shnorr signatures (that will be enabled in the protocol with taproot in November) I think there is no limit to that number.
> And that's iff you happen to find 10 people who fit the specific shape exactly.
I'm not sure what specific shape you're referring to. At the end they all need to sign a specific transaction but that transaction can easily generated by a wallet software or a service provider given all the participants' key and UTXO. They don't need to all send the same amount to the factory.
> LN has always been a "but wait! we've got a solution just around the corner - please don't give up!" feature - but there's nothing around the corner.
The problem itself (on-boarding the whole population) doesn't exist yet either. It doesn't look like a problem impossible to solve by the time it needs to be solved. And if it needs to be solved first then the whole population can probably wait for that to happen.
[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/23893/what-are-t...
It's not just FUD. It's been known for long that a lot of the Chinese interest in crypto is nothing more than evasions of China's capital export controls (see e.g. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3098981/c...).
https://www.dw.com/en/venezuelans-try-to-beat-hyperinflation...
Why would a country embargoed by the USA use USD?
Likely only the wealthy laundering money, probably connected to the Maduro government are playing BTC. Only certain entities and individuals connected to the Maduro government are under sanctions, not everyone in Venezuela - which is why USD remittances are possible in the first place. Folks are using USD because Bitcoin is wildly inappropriate for use as a currency.
[edit] Consider that at the time that article was written the average BTC transaction fee with multiple months minimum wage for the average Venezeulan.
During a hyperinflation crisis everything that isn't money appreciates rapidly by definition. This means the often touted usefulness of bitcoin as "inflation hedge" is rather meaningless, because literally any asset that isn't money is an "inflation hedge". The shoes that I'm wearing right now are an "inflation hedge" just as good as bitcoin. In fact they're a better inflation hedge than bitcoin because their price is more predictable.
As for Maduro, he's just trying to stop capital flight.
Though so far US government authorities have been supportive of USD-based stablecoin use by people living under repressive anti-US governments, even going as far as facilitating transfers of USDC, via Ethereum, to medical and humanitarian groups in Venezuela: https://www.coindesk.com/circle-usdc-venezuela-airtm
Why on earth is it still in place in 2021? Is it because no US politician want to submit a motion for it to be repealed? Or is there a powerful anti-Cuba lobby keeping it there?
So much misery can be lifted with little effort by so few, yet here we are.
Some countries were in the same position as USA of assets seized by the regime, but they accepted symbolic paybacks. USA didn't, probably because they didn't like Cuba destabilizing the Caribean region in the Cold War. At the time, they probably believed that the embargo will damage Cuba regime and cause a quick coup, nobody thought that the regime will survive more than a decade.
Through time this has become a political matter (softening the embargo loses votes in USA, specially in Florida; paying back would expose the regime failure in Cuba when the boogeyman is gone), so both sides at political level are very interested in mantaining the embargo. I tend to see politics as a game of staying in power as long as possible, and here we have a Nash equilibrium where trying to end the embargo goes against both parts. Some people believes (I do) that the embargo helps the regime.
There's no "anti-Cuba" lobby: there's a "anti-Castro lobby". Sadly, this lobby believes in the embargo, and sees its lifting as a weak position against Castro regime.
And Ironically, the current Cuban government's problem seem to be due, in part, to the availability of internet to Cubans, which happened when the embargo was softened.
Yes.
Basically few Americans care either way about Cuba, except for the descendants of those who fled the revolution, who are absolutely furious about it. That has a big effect in Florida.
In Brazil, a few years ago, there was a case of a federal university that purchased Dell workstations for their labs.
Dell told them to stop all relations with Cuba, including academic research as otherwise they wouldn't be able to fulfill the order because of the embargo.
Even though the Brazilian arm of Dell is a Brazilian company, registered in the country and has to follow Brazilian laws, Dell US would be sanctioned if they allowed this transaction to happen.
Last I heard, Brazilian Ministries and the Federal justice system were sueing Dell Brazil. I don't know what was the outcome and could never find information on it.
Sure, they could try to source their lab computers elsewhere, but do you know of any computers that are 100% US-free?
which TL;DR states that it is easiest to trade the most with your largest neighbours. For Cuba, that means Florida (and after that, Mexico and Central American countries). Yes Cuba _can_ trade with more distant partners, but it is less preferable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_model_of_trade
https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Global_economics/Gravity_t...
E.g. China cannot import some items from EU, although they are not under EU sanctions, but because USA effectively controls EU and prohibits trade of some goods with China.
Same with Russia. E.g. every time Russia tries to sell weapons to some third country, USA attempts to create a pressure to cancel the deal.
I'm sure Cuba suffers from similar restrictions.
Anyway, no matter what you do, an island with almost no mineral resources, no source of energy, will always suffer. It doesn't matter whether the government is capitalist or socialist, what currency you use, whether there's embargo or not.
People living in Cuba will be always poor. It's impossible to change that because it would contradict fundamental laws of the universe: you need resources to grow, you need energy.
It's just that now all of them have more or less the same income. If they'd return to capitalist system, very few will become extremely rich (drug suppliers, brothel owners) and the rest will become extremely poor. Just the way it was before revolution.
Here's some of his writings on Cuba. https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-cuban-tank-man-will-be-...