51–60 of 66 posts
"Imagine that you could flee Nazi Germany with all of your capital using nothing more than a password in your head" It's sad so many people know so few things about history. Fleeing with your money was not the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can send a transaction via sms. Any reason why the Venezuelan Government would continue to keep SMS BTC transactions live? IIRC, Venezuelan Government owns all of the infrastructure: electricity, cell phone towers, and the like. They're a socialist nation IIRC, and would easily have the power to crush this option.
> Any reason why the Venezuelan Government would continue to keep SMS BTC transactions live? How would they stop them? I could send the transaction via carrier pigeon if I really needed to. I can encode them however I please.
> I could send the transaction via carrier pigeon if I really needed to. I can encode them however I please.
For fucks sake, this bullshit needs to die. People have made claims like this for years now. It's bullshit. People used to say, "I don't need a network connection, I can conduct transactions on paper." Leaving out the detail that at some point it has to get into the bitcoin network itself.
Bitcoin is essentially useless for people without an internet connection.
In the Brazil situation the country had control of both currencies and could set the exchange rate. I don't see how using Bitcoin would eliminate the problem that the country is experiencing: an unstable currency. Most developed countries target around 2% inflation. Bitcoin has not had that kind of stability recently.
Additionally to be a good currency you want people to think in terms of it, e.g. I'm paying for this coffee with 0.005 bitcoins, not I'm paying for this coffee with $5 worth of bitcoins.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...
Venezuelan here. This won't work. Our problems go way beyond having a way to store our wealth It's literally impossible to do bitcoin transactions in normal circunstances because this is not San Francisco and your regular store doesn't even have internet access, we have one of the worts internet acess in the world [1]. Then there is the problem created by the violence/crime[2]. I myself have to leave my phone at home…
If you could choose between bolivares and some valuable cryptocurrency, what would you choose?
It doesn't fix our economics problems, it doesn't fix our social problems.
And thats what this post was about, the guy intends to fix our economy or "Solve Venezuela’s Hyperinflation" by just giving away free bitcoins.
P.S: Me (and every other venezuelan) would gladly take the free bitcoin. But it will just make me have some extra $ held in some bitcoin wallet, I won't ever use it to go "buy coffe", most likely every young venezuelan who gets free bitcoin will use it to leave the country and scape from this madness
There are far better cryptocurrencies to do this than BTC. Today, an actual venezuelan, part of the team working on a cryptocurrency called Nano, twitted that he paid for his meal with it. This would have never been possible with BTC, why? Mainly because the meal's cost was .5 NANO, which currently amounts to ~5 USD, that would have been the cost of the transaction fee alone for BTC, or even more. Nano is feeless and…
> , part of the team working on a cryptocurrency called Nano Please, stop shilling.
There couldn't be a more relevant cryptocurrency for this than Nano. Especially because Nano isn't mined, it has a fixed supply that was distributed via faucet by solving a very complicated captcha. Many coins went to people in Venezuela because they found solving captchas a more profitable way of spending their time than a real job. So Nano is already popular in Venezuela and does a better job working as a currency than bitcoin.
I have a very favorable opinion of the technology behind Nano and not so favorable of BTC, so my post might be regarded a shill. However, given the reasons above I think mentioning Nano is relevant to the thread.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can send a transaction via sms. Any reason why the Venezuelan Government would continue to keep SMS BTC transactions live? IIRC, Venezuelan Government owns all of the infrastructure: electricity, cell phone towers, and the like. They're a socialist nation IIRC, and would easily have the power to crush this option.
> Any reason why the Venezuelan Government would continue to keep SMS BTC transactions live? How would they stop them? I could send the transaction via carrier pigeon if I really needed to. I can encode them however I please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Venezuela#Curren...
If you want to set up a carrier-pigeon based BTC system. Be my guest. It literally would take something on that level to defeat the censorship regime that Venezuela has placed on its people. I doubt that a "Bitcoin over IP over Carrier Pigeon" solution would work on a wide scale however, mostly because Pigeons die and it takes a lot of effort to train and feed those birds.
I mean, if the Pigeon that was carrying your transaction was eaten by a fox, what then? Its clearly not a good solution. It seems to me that it'd be basically impossible to figure out or verify the balance of a BTC wallet if you were waiting the several days it'd take for a pigeon to fly around.
Just publishing the current Black-Market exchange rate of USD Venezuelan Bolivar is hard enough. I have my doubts that BTC would work under the censorship-heavy Venezuelan regime. And I have severe doubts that the crypto-libertarian dreamworld of BTC would ever become sanctioned by the current Venezuelan Government.
But that's my viewpoint as an outsider. I admit that I don't live in Venezuela, but it seems like they have a lot of problems and "Bitcoin over IP over Carrier Pidgeon" won't be able to solve.
At least Venezuela exists. What is backing bitcoin? Faith? Worse, blind faith?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any reason why the Venezuelan Government would continue to keep SMS BTC transactions live? How would they stop them? I could send the transaction via carrier pigeon if I really needed to. I can encode them however I please.
Depending on the level of control (and competency) the government has over telecom systems, they could easily block SMS transactions by scanning the data stream (SMS is sent in the clear over the network). > I could send the transaction via carrier pigeon if I really needed to. I can encode them however I please. For fucks sake, this bullshit needs to die. People have made claims like this for years now. It's bullshi…
I think the claim has forever been that there are infinitely many ways to securely encode a transaction. The point is to get the transaction outside of whatever hostile territory you're in.
Venezuelan here. This won't work. Our problems go way beyond having a way to store our wealth It's literally impossible to do bitcoin transactions in normal circunstances because this is not San Francisco and your regular store doesn't even have internet access, we have one of the worts internet acess in the world [1]. Then there is the problem created by the violence/crime[2]. I myself have to leave my phone at home…
Venezuelan here. This won't work. Our problems go way beyond having a way to store our wealth It's literally impossible to do bitcoin transactions in normal circunstances because this is not San Francisco and your regular store doesn't even have internet access, we have one of the worts internet acess in the world [1]. Then there is the problem created by the violence/crime[2]. I myself have to leave my phone at home…
Thank you for injecting your experience. Its always good to see comments from people who are actually there!