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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.
You've got Venezuela, Oil prices AND Cryptocurrencies! All hallmarks of financial stability and trust! Excellent work. Where do I send my gold?
Meh, oil backing is overkill. Bitcoin is doing great backed just by thin air. ICO FTW!
(Yes, I am pissed for not thinking about it first. I'd at least make up for the cost of the extra guest at the London Embassy...)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Freedom via the USA coming next month. 82nd Airborne a carrier air group and the air force along with a Marine Brigade
This isn't being backed by oil, it's being backed by Maduro, a compulsive liar prototype dictator that has fallen back on his promises over and over and over again. It's the guy who seized a whole lot of private foreign assets.
You'll be safer putting your money on practically anything else.
Crypto currency backed by Venezuelan oil? You mean you want to privatize that industry your government took over for a profit?
So if I want to trade my Petro for a barrel of crude is it FOB origin, shipping point or FOB destination shipping paid? My guess is it's like the Gold Standard used to be.... Forget trying to cash in.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Lots of people are dying in Venezuela, because all the "right" people have guns. I'd like to believe the parent's post is a bit of sarcasm, but I'm not so sure...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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;
Untrue. VZ oil goes back to the 1920s.
You mean, giving it to poor people like Chavez's daughter (now worth billions).
Poor, but also agriculturally very rich. If the current administration only could maintain farming and some industry beside oil...
Silly libertarians, recoiling over such minor issues like mass starvation and dictatorship.
Venezuela has the second highest homicide rate in the world. Just how much of those killings do you think weren't firearm related? If most of them weren't, that doesn't help the pro gun control crowd at all, and in fact works very much against their argument.
Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government. I wonder if Venezuela will devolve into North Korea levels of destitution.
At least people have been relatively free to flee into neighboring countries, but neighboring countries are starting to clamp down on that because it's becoming unmanageable. Colombia is reported to have had 300,000 migrants in the last 6 months on top of those who fled previously. Brazil has probably seen similar numbers.
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.
A few thousand deaths for any reason is inconsequential in a population of +370,000,000. For those close to those killed it is devastating but that is still a very tiny amount of people when compared against the entire population of a country and the world. Even with all the killing and destruction currently raging non-stop across the planet the number of humans on the planet continues to grow. The one constant throughout the history of human civilization has been the human propensity to use violence and mayhem in endless conflicts waged to control the masses. Every international border on the planet has been drawn and re-drawn in blood. The same genetic traits that helped our species to evolve are the same traits responsible for the violent survival instincts hiding in our DNA. The potential for violence is always there but those tendencies can be consciously managed and mitigated up to a point. The world is flooded with real world violence and killing but we still create outlets where we can indulge our violent tendencies without the associated body count. Sporting events and video games are two such outlets.
And our violent tendencies go hand in hand with our propensity to turn everything into a conflict. We use the internet to feed and nurture our conflicts which will serve as the match to fire off our violent tendencies.
I know it is silly but guns do not kill people the human pulling the trigger kills people. A gun is just one of the countless tools you can use to kill someone. And new gun regulations will not change anything. There are already too many firearms in circulation to create a new law and expect people to just hand over their guns when the government comes knocking. And as the population increases resources become scarcer. As resources become scarcer a war is inevitable and the world already has the weapons to destroy the entire world many times over. In WW2 all the combatants were in an ongoing R&D race during the war to build better weapons and the US reached the pinnacle first. When the next war starts there are already enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon systems ready to deploy on a moments notice.
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
human rights abuses
Depriving the US oil executives of their traditional resources and livelihood. Won't someone please think of the poor Exxon shareholders?
Have gnu, will travel.
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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Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government.
Don't Americans keep saying they have a 'corrupt and authoritarian government'?
They have plenty of guns.
Are Americans just lazy?
Yes, morbidly obese Amerikkkans with a gun fetish love to polish their penis replacement (guns) while fantasizing about overthrowing their government. They are, of course, all talk and no action. Deep down they know their fat ass weekend warrior self with a collection of guns is no match against the government's tanks, planes, helicopters, gunships, drones, and actual trained soldiers.
That would be the CIA and the rich/bourgeois in Venezuela finding excuses for regime change. Capitalists DGAF about starving people before democratic socialists took over, and you'll go right back to not GAF if you install a CIA toady.
Whereas you don't give a shit if people starve as long as The Glorious Revolution marches on?
They would love to, but Venezuela doesn't have the money to out-subsidize American crops that are then dumped into the market via NAFTA.
DO TELL how you would start a business when your competitors can run with what would be losses, perpetually.
Shitbag Ameircans, pretending to GAF about human rights in countries not down with American hegemony, but couldn't care less about the worst dictatorships on the planet that you're busy selling arms to, like the Saudi's. If you were reality-based, you would support Venezuela's democratic socialism, as it tripled the country's GDP and lifted millions out of generational destitution.