[gfarah]

One group of people desperately in need is Venezuelans. You could circumvent the government restrictions and install a form of Exchange in neighboring towns of Colombia e.g Cúcuta. This would be more helpful than cash because 1. They can’t receive/withdraw money in Venezuela at this point reliably 2. They will know they have money saved for their journey out of Venezuela in Colombia and will take the decision to leave the country now.

Source: I live in Colombia and talk with Venezuelans all the time about their situation.

[piano]

This is the n-th time I'm reading a suggestion to help Venezuela using Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies. I wonder whoever came up with this and whether there's any save reasoning behind it or if it's just a cryptonerd fantasy. Venezuela has a very low average internet connection speed, reportedly one of the lowest in the world. Sources I've found say it's no better than 2 Mbit/s. On that speed, downloading the current Bitcoin blockchain would take about 18 days.

With such an internet infrastracture, is the country even capable of maintaining an up-to-date connection to the bitcoin network?

[andirk]

The full bitcoin blockchain from Satoshi's first transaction is huge, but that's for a "full node". A "lightweight node" needs much less https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightweight_node . The amount of internet connection needed is fairly minimal.

Ecuador moved to the US dollar in 2000 because their handling of their own currency wasn't working (and maybe because oil is often traded in USD?). Whether Venezuela uses BTC or some other currency sounds like a good idea at this point. The corrupt actors in their monetary system probably want people to keep using their bolivar though, because that's what the corrupt people stole, are holding, and printing.