El Salvador is the only place on Earth where you can exchange your bitcoins to USD without any questions are being asked. It is the wormhole between bitcoin and legacy financial system.
Also, 45x the economy, 15x the population with significant percentage of it having at least one exchange account. No question asked when bringing money from abroad is the governments policy, strong EU, UK and US financial ties and integrations are in place with billions already laundered. The neighbouring Bulgaria, the police seized 200K Bitcoins and sold them at the previous bull market.
I know what you mean but El Salvador is a micro-wormhole. The value essentially comes from the publicity, they had something like 700 BTC last time I checked.
El Salvador is a storm in a teacup. One noisy storm though. Their president is a millennial who knows how to ride the hype train.
Questions or not, that's a different story, but Citibank in Turkey is not obligated to accept Bitcoin, but in El Salvador - they are under a legal obligation to accept it.
Citibank is active in El Salvador.
2-) Sending/Receiving USD is not as free as you think. You can get sanctioned like IRAN. Every foreign USD transfer must be checked through a blacklist. That's how it works.
Oh and about your 2). I have some exposure to that stuff and I assure you, it's not how it works. The US does have sanctions but these are lists of names and specific corporations, you don't suddenly get into a blacklist. These lists change with the political situations. Also, there are known terrorist, so if you are not one of those or if you are not politically targeted you wont have problems.
If you are in a list, you use private jet to move cash or gold. Turkey is truly the wild west of illicit money at the moment.
If you send USD, it will go through the usual SWIFT mechanisms and will be visible to the USA but you can always move cash and gold. Turkey's proximity to major markets and the infrastructure is excellent. EU is just right there, accessible by plane, train, car, bus or boat. UK is less than 4 hours of flight, just like Dubai.
Istanbul has a physical cash only gold and USD/EUR/GBP trading center. The city of Istanbul is gargantuous, 3 times of El Salvador's population.
Any source on this ? I born and raised in Turkey and I won't let you to bullshit on my country
For context, Reza Zarrab is an Iranian-Azeri who laundered Iranian money with help of a major Turkish government owned bank, Halkbank. He flew gold with his private jet for years. He ended up in the witness protection program in the USA. There are very serious allegation of involvement with high ranking Turkish officials. It come to light that Erdogan personally lobbied Trump during his trail.
The Kingston Brothers are some mormon community in Utah that stole billions from the US government and laundered money with the Help of a Turkish businessman. The brothers are now in a US prison, the Businessman is in Switzerland and Turkey and US are fighting over who is going to get him. That businessman also has proven ties, multiple photos with Erdogan and other highly ranked Turkish officials.
Sedat Peker, a mafia boss who was disowned by the political elite that protected him for years. He escaped to Saudi Arabia and start doing tell-all YouTube videos. He again exposed billions and billions of USD of corruption and drug and arms trade. Many of the allegations were proven or confirmed by those involved but almost no action was taken. When it come time to make a video about Erdogan, he was silenced. At that time Turkey and the Saudis had very bad relations, probably that's why he went to Saudi Arabia. When the video time come to Erdogan, the relationships begin to improve, the saudis intervened and the video about Erdogan never came. Here is his YouTube channel, if you are curious about the Mobster: https://www.youtube.com/c/sedatpekerreis/videos
He got 180 million views! He promised that the next video will be about Erdogan and that video never came.
Tosuncuk, or his real name Mehmet Aydın, is a high school dropout who build an online pyramid scheme in form of a game like farmville. When the scheme collapsed he run away to South America, keeping close to a billion of USD. The exact sum is debatable because he started buying Bitcoins just before the 2018 Bitcoin bull market and run away with unknown amounts of Bitcoins. Just this year, somehow he decided to turn himself in and is promising that he has all the money he collected and can pay back everyone. Again, there were photos of his affiliates posing with the Interior minister and the relatives of the interior minister.
Fascinating stuff are happening in Turkey, sometimes I feel bad for those who don't speak Turkish. Serious next level corruption and drama have been happening the past few years and don't get me started about the stuff that happened from 2013 to 2016. Just amazing. BTW, Turkey's GDP has been in free fall since 2013 and it's definitely not a coincidence.
You can use service like https://hodlhodl.com to exchange peer to peer without questions or identification.
If you're using your bank account, then it's not completely private. However, cash trades are always possible.
On the other hand, Chivo requires strong identification with passport, so it's hardly a wormhole.
I busted out loud at this one :). Of course they will follow "International KYC/AML regulations"
You're right that it's not technically illegal, if you can somehow find another private person (ie. not a business) to transact with, but good luck finding a supply of those. I suspect someone that makes those transactions enough would get classified as a money service business and would be subject to KYC/AML requirements.
People have been prosecuted for the crime of exchanging bitcoin for dollars in person-to-person meetings. It's probably not illegal to do it once for a small amount for a friend, but it absolutely is illegal in the US to do it regularly or for many people or for large amounts.
Could be, but i suspect there are a lot more laws and historic reasons for the swiss status than just banking.
Now the problem with such a system is also quite obvious: Money laundering poisons the whole economy. If you could follow every dollar, you would likely find out it was at some point part of the profit from a criminal operation.
Or you could buy/sell some art anonymously? Or just pop down to vegas?
See eg
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-...
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Cha...
The same thing was applied to a handful of Chinese and Hong Kong officials. See: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3098691/h...
> The extensive and complex nature of the US financial system means non-US international banks would most likely comply with the Hong Kong sanction requests to safeguard their overseas network and US dollar-denominated transactions that are ultimately cleared in the US by passing through the US Clearing House Interbank Payments System (Chips).
My understanding is that if you do not comply you are basically unable to trade in USD.
Good thing they're using bitcoin now!
Are you at all familiar with Latin American history? That's hardly an unprecedented US response to ideological, commercial, or other differences.