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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone local actually accept BTC? That is, do you need to sell your BTC for either USD or pesos before using your money for rent / groceries / phone bill / etc?

Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the elephant in the crypto living room.

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In Argentina taxes total taxes on employee income if you pay all taxes can be above 100%. This is not hyperbole, I spoke with an accountant at a construction company there. They basically had to put 70% of their labor off the books.

Skirting the law is required in Argentina. I can see the appeal for Argentinians.

So the tax in more than the income .. ie you earn net negative for working?

That's my understanding, this is hearsay from a private corporate accountant in the construction industry. I presume the idea is a fully law abiding company would not deduct all of that but some portion would be the company responsibility so that pay is positive.

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds. Ours is a clown country. Don't take it seriously.

The Argentinian govt. could just as easily put the same restrictions as it does on USD today. They can (if they want to) also ensure that no commercial establishment accepts BTC.

You mean, real estate would be priced in Bitcoin, and transactions would be carried out in Bitcoin instead of USD, the way they are today? That would be awesome! A huge vote of confidence in Bitcoin! It would really go a long way to damping Bitcoin's price volatility worldwide, too, by essentially pegging it to physical-world goods with durable value, even if they aren't portable goods.

Denominating prices in BTC doesn't magically make the price of BTC any less volatile. Prices would have to be updated several times every day.

It's true that if you can update prices instantly, offering a trade doesn't stabilize the prices of the things you are offering to trade. But that is not how the real estate market works; bids and offers are made with a validity time measured in days or weeks, not minutes, and asking prices are often printed in office windows.

But it's a silly idea. It's not going to happen, and the point of my comment was to explain why.

We have wallet apps for payments, some give you a debit card to automatically sell crypto for pesos.

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