How Bitcoin Is Disrupting Argentina’s Economy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Bitcoin however is great for avoiding the official fake exchange rate and getting the real rate, which is often 2x the amount of the official rate. If you're travelling to BA you want to avoid those sketchy blackmarket moneychangers floating around. If you're a tourist there's good odds you'll be receiving counterfeit Argentinian Pesos or end up getting jacked by a guy on a motorbike after he watches you exchanging money in the streets whereas with Bitcoin you can safely meet somebody in a coffee shop, do the trade and they usually have some kind of localbitcoins.com or other online reputation they want to keep so won't be handing over counterfeits.
Bitcoin hasn't replaced the mass exodus of Argentinians who deposit money outside the country in Uruguay yet. http://en.mercopress.com/2013/03/05/an-estimated-one-million...
Maybe there is room to provide this service with Bitcoin, selling bitcoin to this people in Montevideo and buying Argentinian pesos with that Bitcoin in Argentina.
Is it possible to make this work with a 1~2% commission using Bitcoin?
It’s interesting that it mentions “The American company Coinbase” but doesn’t mention Coinbase’s Argentine origins. Maybe Brian wouldn’t give an interview to the author?
This is a good example of why I haven’t been willing to get involved in Bitcoin so far, despite finding it fascinating: we’ve known since May presented the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto at Hackers (1989?) that a likely endgame of anonymous digital currencies was that governments would lose their ability to impose capital controls and indeed taxes. While I’m skeptical about the ontological status or moral value of the State, I also don’t want public education, policing, and public healthcare to disappear overnight without a chance to construct alternatives; racism and other hateful ideologies promoted by States over the centuries to keep their subjects divided can simply explode into violence.
(I’m not worried about “terrorists and organized crime” — those are of course terrible but nothing we haven’t dealt with before. I’m worried about the collapse of governments leading to a collapse of civilization, which is a thing that has happened before, with disastrous results — the Bronze Age collapse, the Maya collapse, the fall of Rome, and so on.)
If it catches on, though, continuing to abstain might become as difficult as Stallman’s continued abstention from using the internet, or the abstention of the Amish from driving cars. And I will yield.
What surprises me is that the article identified the person with full name and photo - while his activities are clearly illegal (trading black market dollars for BTC, tax evasion most likely too).
It's rather imprudent, IMHO.
I think you may be mistaken that “selling commodities for foreign currency is illegal”, because every Coto grocery store has a sign at every checkout counter explaining that they accept US dollars and Euros for their groceries, and at what ratio to the peso. And they’re enrolled in Precios Cuidados, so whatever illegal things they do, they pretty much have to do them in secret. There might be something illegal about selling Bitcoin for USD, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not simply that it’s selling a commodity for foreign currency.
> The number of Bitcoin users in Argentina is relatively small; it barely registers on most charts of global Bitcoin usage.
This article is hype: "This article was adapted from 'Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money'". It reads like a press release because it is one.
> This is the street-smart economics. Not the complex Ph.D. economics.
The phrase "I'm not book-smart, I'm street-smart" can be rephrased "I'm not real-credible, I'm fake-credible." It's the sort of thing expert beginners say, particularly when they've reached the stage of recognising and disparaging actual expertise in their subject. And hoo boy, Bitcoiners are at the far end of expert beginner.
There is no reason to expect anything good or useful from this article.
That's the very definition of not disrupting.
This article is a press release for a book.
If you point at a crack in the wall and say "The wall is falling over!" I'm going to laugh in your face. Then I'll get some spackle.
For your wall analogy, let's look at the word "destroy." A crack starts in the wall, and grows until the wall falls over. At this point, the wall is destroyed. But when the crack that eventually destroys the wall is still small, is the wall "destroyed" at that point? Of course not. Does that make the word "destroyed" useless? Not at all.
I've been present for three big revolutions in technology (personal computing, the Internet, and mobile data/smartphones) and with each there were detractors that dismissed the ultimate effect and utility of these new arrivals. I'm not so sure we aren't repeating that mistake.
I'm hedging my bets. It might be the case that Bitcoin the currency never makes it, but the technology that underpins it might live on in some useful construct when applied to a problem where the utility is more apparent, even if that connection isn't at all clear now.
I'm living in Peru, where there were two hyperinflations in the late 80s and early 90s. The Sol has been very stable ever since, so a lot of people trust their savings in Soles accounts now, but a few people I've met from older generations have their savings in silver coins.
Psychic prediction. In ten years, there will be some jurisdictions where possesion of a copy of the bitcoin ledger will be a criminal offense.
But your point stands, monetary (or fiscal) policy was awful.
So, we consider bitcoin a legally-accepted currency, then it's already illegal to trade for them.
One of the main problems is that legally trading ARS to USD has a huge overhead:
* You have to use the "official" price, which is ~60-70% the street price. * You have to pay 30-40% taxes on the exchange.
To which the answer is, of course, "Betteridge."