Bitcoin Transactions Rise As Economic Unrest Hits Argentina | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Transactions Rise As Economic Unrest Hits Argentina

techcrunch.com

45 pointsSealy12 comments

1) One of the best cryptographic analysis of bitcoins is from an Argentinian: https://bitslog.wordpress.com

2) If the developer is Argentinian he/she can do the job for foreign company and earn dollars.

3) They can bring the dollars to the country using the black market.

Why not use bitcoin instead of dollars? The point of using dollars in Argentina is to avoid inflation by a central entity, but doesn't bitcoin solve that problem better? It has the added benefit of not being explicitly illegal and having to use a black market.

If you are a developer bitcoins are not the best option. How many customers will prefer to pay you in bitcoins than in the local currency? very few and it can be an extra headache for them. Also bitcoins' fluctuations can play against you because you can't change your price all the time according its hourly value.

Good customers might not mind or find it much of hassle.

Compared to sending hard currency to a an Argentinian, it might be far less hassle, especially for the developer.

And you can quite easily change your BTC price all the time: negotiate the rate in USD, but always settle in BTC, using the exchange rate at the moment of payment.

Good customers tend to be a rare too though.

It's less about the fluctuation and more about other services not accepting Bitcoin at the moment. If your utility providers accept Bitcoin that could grease the wheels a bit toward general acceptance.

I don't even consider Bitcoin's privacy as a selling point; more than that, it's that real forgery is impossible like going back to the days of trading with gold*

*Of course there were crafty forgers mixing in lead and the like to make fake coins and bullion, but crypto makes that harder.

Bitcoin offers pretty poor privacy. Bitcoin is basically like using a credit card that posts every purchase you make on the Internet. Now, unlike a credit card your name isn't necessarily tied to the a bitcoin wallet, but realistically you're unlikely to have more than a few bitcoin wallets, and even if you have multiple ones, any transfers you make between them will also be publicly broadcast, so someone with a bit of computing power can likely compute with very high probability what you're doing with your money if they can locate a single transaction they know you have made.

It's easy to send USD to an Argentinian using a "cave".

Try to ask a customer to pay you in bitcoins and please let me know your experience.

What do you mean by 'cave'?

Of course, Bitcoin-paying customers are currently rare. But it solves some cross-border problems, and I've met a number of software developers who prefer Bitcoin-paying work, and know of a number of projects that pay in Bitcoin.

"Caves" are the informal name of the places in Argentina where you can change and receive dollars.

Ask a customer in the Fortune 500 to pay you in bitcoins...

Thanks for the explanation of the 'cave' lingo. Is it called 'cave' because it's illegal/underground?

Does the Fortune 500 typically hire remote solo developers across borders, and using 'caves' for payment delivery? I don't think so: they have internal teams or use agencies, and avoid informal/underground mechanisms... at least in the US, in my experience.

My problem was with the categorical statement, "If you are a developer bitcoins are not the best option". It depends; for some developers and some projects that I've spoken to, they prefer to send or receive it.

If I were a startup in San Francisco and wanted to pay an Argentine developer several thousand USD each month for services, how would a 'cave' help me get USD to them, and what would be my costs?

With Bitcoin, I could send the BTC from my laptop, at a cost of less than 10¢ per payment (if I already have the Bitcoin) or about 1% of the total (if I have to purchase Bitcoin). If the developer then wants USD or ARS, perhaps then they can go to their favorite 'cave'; they'll know more about spelunking than me.

I hope these kind of events help lead up to a critical mass where adoption starts to skyrocket. What articles like these show is that people are starting to have more faith in the cryptography-backed currencies then their own government backed currencies.

Great news for those bullish on bitcoin. (Like myself)

Please do not spread this FUD, I write this from Argentina and believe me there is no economic unrest. There is a great political battle and every side uses as much press as they can get but that does not make any of what they publish true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com