Argentina restricts online shopping as foreign reserves drop

- 20% VAT rate

- Roughly 60% marginal payroll taxes for highest earners (including both employee-paid income tax and employer-paid payroll taxes)

- 58 guns per capita in 2007

I just don't see how enough of them can get in for it to matter all that much.

You can say the same today. The problem with Argentina is that while it got a GDP equal to Canada in last century, the money was never good distributed, like in Canada, Germany or France.

So just a couple of people will own more than half Texas(Argentina is big) while the rest of the population could only live as servants.

Today big latifundistas still own most of Argentina, and they buy the gobertment like in the past.

Economic unity is very attractive, especially considering the financial/legal hurdles that come with reaching customers in a dozen different currencies in a dozen different national jurisdictions.

The global BTC currency is irrelevant to this use-case which is to provide a local people group with a currency option that cannot be manipulated by the same people that screwed up their original currency option but which is calibrated to the economic output of the local people group (e.g. it's not too expensive relative to the per-capita GDP of local Argentinians).

It doesn't matter that BTC exists globally, or at all. The reason I even mentioned or suggested BTC was because (a) it exists, (b) it has certain properties that make it good at avoiding manipulation, (c) that it can be repurposed.

If you replaced Bitcoin's genesis block with a new one, and got a bunch of people to agree that this was for valuation wrt a particular economy (e.g. because Argentinian BTC miners mine on the chain beginning with this block, and few people in the global community do because there isn't an incentive for them to), then what would happen is that the value of that entirely different and distinct economy ought to come to represent the value gained by that group of miners. Who, hopefully, are in Argentina and who trade with other Argentinians. Does that make sense?

"Argentina entered the new century in straits similar to those of a disquieting number of European counties today. With the peso shackled to the dollar, it had (as Greece, Spain, and the other so-called PIIGS on the periphery of the Eurozone do today) what appeared to be an irremediably overvalued currency sapping the competitiveness of its exports, along with mounting difficulties servicing its debt as tax receipts dwindled in the face of recession. The counsel of the IMF was naturally for austerity. The Argentines should maintain dollar convertibility—that is, a pricey currency—and trim public expenditure in order to cover interest payments. . . . [Yet] austerity in the face of gigantic indebtedness . . . yielded precisely the devaluation and default it was supposed to prevent. If the Argentine experience is truly as exemplary as the IMF once maintained, the story can’t be a heartening one in light of the turn toward austerity today being undertaken in Europe and threatened in the US."

In contrast, the Forbes article is entirely unclear. It fails to explain the key point that the IMF was not just advocating depreciation, but was pushing for the sort of restrictive government austerity that has been forced on Greece.

"it’s also difficult to see quite what is unorthodox or heterodox about following the standard IMF prescription for a country in such problems. Default, renegotiate the debt burden and devalue the currency to try and spark an export boom."

Krugman's point is simple and stands. A simple comparison of Argentina's GDP growth post-2001 with Greek growth post-2008 shows this plainly enough: one economy recovered quickly and the other is still sinking.