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Venezuelans Flock To Cryptocoins Amid Spiralling Inflation (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Demand for digital coins is soaring in Venezuela amid an escalating political crisis that has protesters demanding that President Nicolas Maduro step down. Inflation has spiraled to the triple digits, debasing the bolivar and depleting savings, while citizens struggle to find everything from food to medicine on store shelves. "If you're going to be in something volatile, you might as well be in something that's volatile and rising than volatile and falling," says Ryan Taylor, chief executive officer of crypto currency Dash Core, the third-largest digital coin by number of transactions... Bitcoin trading volume in Venezuela jumped to $1.3 million this week, about double the amount that changed hands two months ago, according to LocalBitcoins.com...
Venezuela's currency has become nearly worthless in the black market, where it takes more than 6,000 bolivars to buy $1, while bitcoin surged 53 percent in the past month alone. But it's not just about shielding against the falling bolivar, as some Venezuelans are using crypto currencies to buy and sell everyday goods and services, according to Jorge Farias, the CEO of Cryptobuyer.
Venezuela's currency has become nearly worthless in the black market, where it takes more than 6,000 bolivars to buy $1, while bitcoin surged 53 percent in the past month alone. But it's not just about shielding against the falling bolivar, as some Venezuelans are using crypto currencies to buy and sell everyday goods and services, according to Jorge Farias, the CEO of Cryptobuyer.
Want to know what a crazy lefty is up to? Just listen to what he accuses his opponents of doing.
What happened?
Did they run out of other people's money?
Like Greece? Detroit? Illinois?
No, this is the point where you use basic political science definitions and point out that the thing that shitty governments tend to have in common far more than economic leanings is being authoritarian. Venezeula isn't shitty because they have universal healthcare, they are shitty because they have a dictator, and with a dictator, you tend to not actually fall within the ideals of any popular economic model.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Except authoritarians ruling capitalist countries tend to do far better economically than authoritarians ruling communist countries. Examples: Pinochet's Chile, Nazi Germany, modern day China.
Authoritarianism is bad.
Communism is bad.
But the combination is even worse.
Socialism is necessarily totalitarian and dictatorial. You simply cannot have a society that is both free and socialist. Socialists acknowledge that by calling it a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
The route to freedom under socialism is the elimination of everybody who doesn't behave according to socialist ideals: work camps, secret police, and massive indoctrination.
So stop lying and pretending that Venezuela is some kind of aberration. You are deplorable.
Is Maduro a dictator?
Yes. He is ruling by decree. He ignores the legislature, and has packed the judiciary with his cronies.
IIRC he was regularly elected.
Being elected doesn't make you a non-dictator. Hitler was elected. Maduro became president when Chavez died, and was re-elected soon after by a razor thin majority that is widely viewed as fraudulent.
his opponents will have to win the presidential election to kick him out.
Since Maduro controls the army, the judiciary, and the election infrastructure, that may prove difficult.
The techniques failed, not the political philosophy.
This is Leftism in a nutshell. It is never the fault of the ideology when 30 million people starve to death, and a billion are impoverished. It is only because someone failed to tweak the "purity" knob on the policy dashboard. Whatever.
>Communism will work! The only reason it hasn't happened so far is because
we keep running out of Other People's Money, for some reason.
You are talking about Communism when you say Socialism. There are less extreme versions of socialism that aren't dictatorships. Having the government build and maintain roads is socialism, so is a government run police department or army. Having the government subsidize farmers and the "War on Drugs" is classic Socialism straight out of Karl Marx but Republicans have no problem with those.