Argentina does look like the most interesting country to dig deeper into here.
As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.
Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."
That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?
I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.
That seems obvious to me that they absolutely don't want crypto. If it's stablecoins they're after then what they really want is USD, so badly that they'll use whatever shady unregulated crypto bank sells it to them.
They will use crypto because it’s far more difficult to censor. The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth, but this is becoming a lot harder and will continue to be ever harder.
I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet.
And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.
> I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges.
You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine, and _any kind of so-called quasi-cash operations_ including buying cryptocurrencies or transferring money to exchanges. And paying salaries in anything but national currency is of course illegal. So tech-savvy folks could still try to find local who owns crypto and would sell it for cash, but for regular people crypto doesn't offer any respite.
A lot of poor countries with socialist / corrupt governments like Argentina rely extensively on informal money transmitter networks as well as money remittances. Exporters earn hard currency which is stolen by the central bank and converted into disgustingly inflated fiat, and then politically favorited importers get access to whatever hard currency hasn’t been looted outright by politicians. Small people have to get dollars other ways.
Stablecoins are acquired in less-authoritarian countries and then sent to people in Argentina and other socialist / corrupt countries. They then circulate among the people just like paper dollars do. As this black market grows it is very difficult to shut it down.
Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely the socialists try to adapt to this new world rather than shut down the internet. It will be interesting to see what new theft they come up with.
Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:
If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.
> The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth
Do you have evidence for that? While the Argentinian economy is struggling, and the government has defaulted in the past few years, I don’t know of widespread, illegal government theft of private citizens’ assets. The opposite seems true: they want people to get richer in exports, so they get more in taxes.
Is your argument that taxation is theft? They do need taxation in order not to default again.
And those people who circumvent the censorship are faithful in their tax reports?
No, they are not. They are abusing cryptocurrency (the correct term, no matter how often you use 'crypto') to commit tax fraud. Which makes the government even more inefficient as it already is.
I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto. You will see a lot of countries with corrupt governments and central banks become bottom-up crypto centric, but this won’t be reported for a long time until suddenly the NYT will release an article and only then it is “actually” happening.
> Thomas Semaan is an ex-student of Saifedean who has been active in the Lebanese bitcoin scene. He joins us to tell us about the Lebanese fiat crisis, how bitcoin has helped him and other bitcoiners, and compare its effectiveness to political activism and delusions of reform.
This is the problem. Obviously bitcoin is of use and interest to bitcoiners. What we're trying to understand is if regular, non-bitcoiners are getting value from it on a large scale.
Is crypto in Argentina and Lebanon something that has a real impact on regular people who are not deeply involved in the technology?
This is why I only believe it when a publication like the BBC or the NYT cover it: crypto incentivizes people who hold it to boost it, so it's very hard to trust stories that don't come from news sources with strong conflict of interest policies and a long standing reputation for journalistic integrity.
I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is effectively being funneled away into entities operating as foreign banks. The government is forced to accept crypto to avoid insolvency and now makes it so you have to pay your taxes in it. If they're still corrupt they'll force people to follow the same regressive restrictions again, and no one will be able to do anything about it because the blockchain is all public. How is this going to help anything? I'm trying not to be bleak here but the idea here seems to be disregarding any hope of reasonable reform.
I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil. Politicians have been able to steal from common people via inflation for a century while the rich are easily protected.
This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
Of course I’m a minority but like all movements crypto is selling something to average people but the grand plan is only understood by a minority. Countries like Argentina have been basket cases for decades despite endless bailouts and IMF shenanigans. It’s time for something new that I believe is a valuable experiment with clear theoretic and ideological underpinnings that couldn’t possibly be worse than the socialist nightmare destroying billions of common people.
>I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto
I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.
>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.
Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.
> I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil.
The problem is that your alternative has proven to be worse.
But also, lets assume that everyone in Argentinia is going to convert all of their currency into cryptocurrency.
What kind of repercussions is this going to have?
Well, for one, the currency in which people get paid is still the Argentinian one, not a cryptocurrency. Keep that one in mind, because its going to be affected by the rest.
What is going to happen next is massive tax fraud. People are not going to pay taxes over their belongings (you might agree with that as 'libertarian' but its going to hurt the government income for sure). This is going to result in a weaker government, and a weaker coin.
With a weaker government and a weaker coin, people get less value out of their currency. Remember that the people were paid in the national currency? Its worth less now. And also, what is going to happen when the government runs weaker? More crime, less public health, outsourcing to private entities, and defacto you will get something akin to some libertarian paradise where the top on the pyramid can actually survive and have opportunities, while the rest ends up on the bottom of cannon fodder.
With cryptocurrency, there's no such thing as accountability or paying your taxes. Such libertarian dreams are going to have the effect that the government becomes weakened and eventually you get that survival of the fittest in an unhealthy way. Without accountability and without taxes you'll get more corruption, not less. If you want an example of that, just look at Russia.
Meanwhile, all of these people are heavily dependent on? On what you think? Exchanges. Which, as proven by Mt. Gox, are not always going to be pure in their effort. So spare me the independence bullshit.
Centralized banking works, as long as there's accountability. You reach accountability by rule of law, by regulations. Cryptocurrencies try to avoid these, but neglects the reasons these were enacted in the first place. They're a massive step backwards in that regard.
As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.
Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."
That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?