Mocking the situation helps nobody. But Venezuelans had fair and free elections not that long ago. The precursors to these policies were wilfully elected into office by the populace. That confers at least some responsibility; more than in the cases of kings, colonisers, invaders or revolutionaries.
Venezuelan elections have been widely critized as shams and have been largely boycotted by opposition parties in Venezuela.
Venezuela has significant oil wealth but has been ruled by a corrupt and autocratic single party for decades that has squandered and embezzled that wealth.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-18288430
Never give up your right to bear arms Americans!
You can trust it because you have enough observers, whom are indeed important to select well (covering all the biases). They monitor the voting and counting to make cheating on a large scale a large conspiracy, which by definition must have large public support.
It is a joke. The world we live in is absurd. Government inflates its own currency so bad it wipes out the entire economy. Citizens are left holding worthless paper. That happened in my country too. It could happen in yours. Actually it's only a matter of time before it happens to every currency in the world: they're all inflationary. The solution? More of the same. Start from scratch by creating a new currency to inflate. This is exactly what they did. Multiple times.
We either laugh at this insanity or we cry.
Also, it's perfectly possible to inflate bitcoin despite its fixed supply. It's possible to inflate any currency. Implement fractional reserve banking on top of it. New coins will be created through loans, inflating the currencies.
Bitcoin is already used in lots of countries which suffer from inflation. It doesn't seem to be a failure. In El Salvador, there are more people with a bitcoin wallet than people with a bank account. More than 30% of people in Nigeria have used bitcoin. It's also popular in Venezuela.
FRB is not a problem, because bitcoin can and should be owned non-custodially. Paper bitcoins created by a bank wouldn't be compatible with actual bitcoins, and wouldn't expand its supply.
Because its technology is obsolete. Monero is everything bitcoin set out to be and more.
> Do you think that Bitcoin is too easy to stop for governments?
Absolutely. The public blockchain is actually more transparent than the banking system. To stop bitcoin transactions they don't even need to attack nodes or whatever. Bitcoins aren't fungible. Governments can just remove them from circulation at any time by making it illegal to accept them. Exchanges already refuse tainted coins. Some even refuse to deal with private wallets at all.
> Bitcoin is already used in lots of countries which suffer from inflation.
I don't disagree with this. It seems to work well as protection against inflation. Got to the point some governments got pissed about it because nobody was using their worthless currencies anymore and that took away their power to set monetary policy.
> FRB is not a problem, because bitcoin can and should be owned non-custodially.
Very few people actually do this. Huge fees, inherent risks. Most people keep their coins in exchanges. They're the new banks.
> Paper bitcoins created by a bank wouldn't be compatible with actual bitcoins, and wouldn't expand its supply.
There are no paper bitcoins. It's already happening at the exchanges. The coins sitting in people's accounts are undoubtedly being loaned out. Users even receive interest.
Goverments, especially in poor countries, are starting to advocate for Bitcoin, so it seems that 'government banning' is not an actual threat. For some governments it is, but people can move out. They couldn't use Monero either if it's illegal to accept.
Yeah and it sucks. I hate how popular bitcoin is despite being the worst cryptocurrency in existence. Meanwhile, monero can actually be used as private digital cash right now but nobody knows about it.
> However, Lightning Network makes bitcoin more fungible and private, so I'm not worried about that.
It also makes it less decentralized. What's the point of the blockchain if you need this high level stuff?
Bank dollars (your account balance) aren't compatible with coin machines and yet we still use them as if they are the same thing.
By contrast, BTC, with an algorithmically determined monetary policy, does actually solve the issue. And the other issues that you raise, i.e. that a highly volatile asset is a poor unit of account, are not actually issues -- you can simply transact in USD (or a stablecoin) for most day to day matters, while having the ability to always revert to BTC or other assets as an uninflatable store of wealth when desired.
You seem to imply that all inflation is inevitably a buildup for hyperinflation, but there is no mechanism for that.
Why not deflation? Can't be worse than governments that mint trillions out of nowhere.
> Why are you so sure of that?
I'm not. Is anyone? These governments don't seem to be sure either. We wouldn't have these problems if they were.
> an additional zero or two within the span of a lifetime is not a problem waiting to be solved
The loss of purchasing power implied by those extra zeroes is a huge problem. Inflation is basically a constant unconditional tax on everyone holding the currency. This is absolutely a problem that needs to be solved. People solve it by spending or investing their money. Anything's better than holding the inflationary currency.
> You seem to imply that all inflation is inevitably a buildup for hyperinflation
Not really. All government currencies inflate. There's absolutely no doubt their value will approach zero given enough time. The only question is how quickly it will happen. Hyperinflation just means the government screwed up so bad the inflation started accelerating out of control.
It would require negative interest rates and it would also require people to acknowledge that we need a more flexible labor market rather than one where full time jobs pile up on fewer people. Let's consider an extreme example. Everyone adopts Bitcoin and everyone has the bare minimum expenses. They pay rent and bake their own bread. The amount of work hours needed to support this lifestyle is 8 hours per week.
Let's say that everyone wants this lifestyle but everyone still wants to work full time. That would imply that there is one full time job for every 5 people with 1 person being employed and 4 unemployed and you would now have to engage in income sharing (you know, welfare, unemployment benefits, universal basic income). If people worked according to how much they demand themselves (everyone works 8 hours), then everyone would be employed and everyone would be getting their fair share of work.
Before you say that some of them will demand more than 8 hours of work. These people should work more than 8 hours.
>The loss of purchasing power implied by those extra zeroes is a huge problem. Inflation is basically a constant unconditional tax on everyone holding the currency. This is absolutely a problem that needs to be solved. People solve it by spending or investing their money. Anything's better than holding the inflationary currency.
What function does holding onto the currency serve other than decreasing demand for labor? Why should we compensate anyone for their reduction in the demand for labor? The logic behind interest is that someone wants to invest and the lack of labor requires prioritization according the yield of the investment. If people decrease demand for labor without a corresponding desire to invest by borrowers they simply get nothing. It's actually worse, if demand for labor is lower than supply of labor then the excess labor simply decays through unemployment (labor cannot be stored) which implies a negative yield on your money which is why inflation is an approximation of negative interest rates.
So, perfect money would have 0% inflation or deflation but it would probably have negative interest to encourage people to avoid the economic loss of unemployment. If labor decayed at a rate of -2% then people would invest more into durable goods by anticipating future demand. It would be better to build solar panels and wind farms today that may only be profitable in the future. Of course the problem is that some goods are artificially durable like land. Ownership doesn't decay.
Wealth accumulation.
> Why should we compensate anyone for their reduction in the demand for labor?
Why should we not reward people for being responsible with their money? People should be saving it, not spending it all on pointless consumerism. If our money will be more valuable tomorrow than it is today, we would need damn good reasons to part with it. Hopefully industry practices like planned obsolescence would disappear.
No it's not. It's perfectly fine if universal "you owe me"s cannot be held back indefinitely only strike with even more force when unleashed. And I say that as someone who is hit harder by inflation than most because I enjoy liquidity far more than I should, I'm very bad at converting into assets (or even taking up a loan)
Loans are adjusted for inflation already.
I doubt that there are many people that will be really hit by it, because it is like rain in a tsunami.
You can always save in real assets. Why does everyone want to save in a promise that someone else will work for you?