Enter 'petro': Venezuela to launch oil-backed cryptocurrency
reuters.com
reuters.com
Stay away from this.
How so? My understanding is that they just won regional elections praised by international observers as free and transparent[0].
Interestingly, western governments/media & opposition claims of fraud (without evidence) directly contradict the findings of the delegation from the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA). From the article cited:
The CEELA delegation was comprised of 1300 international observers, including former Colombian Electoral Court President Guillermo Reyes, ex-president of the Honduran Supreme Electoral Court, Augusto Aguilar, and former Peruvian electoral magistrate Gastón Soto.
According to the body’s report, the vote was held under conditions of “total normality” and the right to a secret ballot was “guaranteed”.
I also find this interesting:
For its part, CEELA has reported that it has yet to receive any formal denunciations from the opposition, which has issued its fraud allegations via the media.
President Maduro has requested a 100 percent audit of Sunday’s elections, a call that was subsequently echoed by the [opposition].
If you search "ceela venezuela vote" on Google, the only articles that come up are from teleSUR (a mouthpiece of the Venezuelan government) and Venezuela analysis (another rabidly left organization, the one you cited).
Do you have any fairly impartial news sources you'd care to cite?
Of course, this could all be a plot of the evil Imperialist western capitalist powers to strangle the last peoples' stronghold. /s
From your sarcasm I take it you're unaware of the history of leftist governments in Central and South America?
Even with the term "banana republic" there was an economic endgame in sight (e.g. cheaper fruit).
This current Venezuela farce has absolutely no redeeming qualities unless you're a member of the ruling elite (of Venezuela).
By your reasoning, every economic and/or political collapse in Central/South America can be blamed on the history of United States intervention, absolving the government of all accountability.
That said, I think it's possible the revolution has deteriorated since the death of Chavez and that corruption is indeed rife. I'm just wary given the history of propaganda.
I also think its possible that the administration still has popular support in spite of its real problems, given the violent right-wing nature of the opposition and the apparent lack of credible evidence suggesting otherwise.
> the violent right-wing nature of the opposition and the apparent lack of credible evidence suggesting otherwise.
People in Venezuela have lost 19 pounds on average in the past couple of years. Take a look at the exchange rates. What is the profit for "right-wing" groups?
Looks like the US need some left wing rule. But yeah this is fake news. Don't lie to pretend you have a point kiddo.
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2172028...
The last time I checked, the Economist is a fairly neutral news organization.
Although el gordo Maduro hasn't had too much trouble finding rice and beans, by the look of things.
How do you know that a country lost weight? They didn't show how they got these numbers, just said it as an IMF forecast. This is plain simple manipulation. It is a shame that my first comment got so many downvotes.
If you distrust all news sources that disagree with your point of view, I don't know what else to say.
This study was conducted by Venezuelan universities.
What argument would you want to hear that would make you decide that Venezuela is a hideously mismanaged dictatorship? They can't keep up production of oil, which is their (95%) only source of foreign reserves.
You seem to discredit research done by native institutions and distrust mainstream media.
I hear Victoria falls is really nice. And you can prove all the propoganda wrong. Good luck. Bring some hard currency.
People in Caracas will jack you for a biscuit and 10 (amercian) bucks.
Yes, a Bolivarian paradise. Have fun at Victoria falls.
Btw, I'm more chino than gringo. Just so you know.
Do you mean the fake organization started by Hugo Chavez to legitimize elections in socialist states? The one that doesn't have a website or an organizational charter and gets its funding from Venezuela?
FOH.
The value of a nation's currency is determined by how difficult it is to get vs how much you need to get it. And that is determined by the nation's spending and taxing policies - including the ability to enforce that taxation by force if necessary.
The Bolivar needs to fully float on the international markets like the Egyptian Pound. And then the government needs to start taxing people in Bolivars while not issuing as many by spending.
It doesn't matter than nobody wants to hold Bolivars. It matters that they need to get them to stay out of jail.
I am not sure if that’s even possible, it doesn’t make much sense. How do you link the currency to those reserves in a way that is any different to the current currency?
That being said, a crypto which is relatively stable could be very useful for countries with runaway inflation or other issues with the state. Both for local use and liquidity across global markets.
Look at US treasury bonds: the US can adjust the interest rate on them, but it's the market (dealers holding auctions, etc.) that actually sets the price of them. If everything else is a bad investment (like during the 2007 recession), people will actually buy the likely-negative-yield treasury bonds at a premium, because they need to stick the money somewhere and everything else looks to have a worse NPV. As such, the market value of any security can exceed the value of its call option.
Sounds like a blast from the past.
If the Venezuelan government will sell anyone one oilcoin for a barrel of oil, nobody would buy one for more. If the Venezuelan government will buy an oilcoin for one barrel of oil from anyone, nobody would sell one for less.
They almost certainly won't be freely exchangeable to this degree, but there is no problem with price controls in theory.
It seems like there's a fairly tight correlation between the value of a cryptocurrency and the effort required to mine it. (Which is what you'd expect -- if the price of BTC rises, more people mine it, and the per-block difficulty increases, and if the price falls, fewer people mine it, and the difficulty falls.)
I wonder if we could create a more stable cryptocurrency by keeping the mining difficulty constant (or possibly tied to moore's law). It may be wildly "inflationary" in terms of the size of the monetary base, but it should be fairly stable in terms of real resources per unit of currency.
PoS coin supplies should be avoided, as the production cost or input work is not worth the speculative asset produced.
XRP is a case study in how they've created artificial scarcity and can flood the market with sell orders from their reserves.
https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over...
I'm interested by your idea, but you would need to work by a different consensus model. Proof-of-stake would be interesting to investigate, since mining doesn't scale with computation power, rather holding of the currency.
Has mining cost matched? Or is mining cost a ceiling for trading price
And the government can seize money at any time, Tether style, by invalidating public coin addresses it seems dirty.
I don't know how Venezuela expects anyone to take this seriously after they defaulted on their bond payments in November.
For example to have an "account" at a national reserve bank, you basically need to be a bank. A reserve bank could promise to honour certain cryptocurrency transactions between registered banks. But the blockchain as a whole could serve include both reserve-compatible-account-ids and arbitrary users.
Whether that would be good for anything is another matter. In particular you need a well respected 3rd party who actually wants to back a cryptocurrency. That's not a big set intersection, and Venezuela is not in a position to make it larger.
OTOH, if someone with centuries of banking experience were to launch a well managed cryptocurrency, that could be pretty useful (Switzerland I am looking at you).
I would like to see a digital currency whose money supply is linked to the number of users in the system. As more users enter the system, generate proportionally more coins and vice versa. Something like this might work as a stable store of value.
Fortunately, as has been proven by recent experience, fraud, hacking, or serious error in the area of cryptocurrencies or the blockchain in general is simply impossible.
Ah, we have their assurance. Alright then.
These guys are thieves and charlatans, so I expect they will devalue this currency as well when it suits them.
Now they are reduced to third-rate schemes in the hope somebody gives them some money.
Remember a couple of years ago whem tons of leftist, including sanders, krugman and stigliz all talked about how create these developments were? Finally somebody that would look out for 'the people'.
However, some defense contractors get good contracts through interventionism, and that keeps the US economy going, right?
"The date of the invasion is now a national holiday in Grenada, called Thanksgiving Day, which commemorates the freeing, after the invasion, of several political prisoners, who were subsequently elected into office."