Venezuelan refugees enter Colombia in search of food to feed their families. Inflation, projected at a maximum of 1 million percent, has turned the bolivars into waste paper. More than 3 million Venezuelans have fled since 2014 and 5,500 leave every day. Escaping with almost nothing, desperate and vulnerable, turning the Venezuelan into one of the worst refugee crisis in the world.
"Today, Venezuelans are adopting and experimenting with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to evade hyperinflation and strict financial controls."
The industry of cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain has been overshadowed by speculation, fraud and greed, thus undermining its real and liberating potential. But for people living under authoritarian governments, Blockchain can be a valuable financial tool as a means of exchange resistant to censorship.
The new laws force Venezuelans to go to local banks to conduct transactions abroad and require banks to disclose information about how people obtain and use their money. A bank transfer can find a rate as high as 56% as it goes from dollars to bolivars in a process that can last several weeks. The regulations have prevented customers from using foreign IP addresses to access their online accounts.
As an alternative to this situation, some Venezuelans have begun to receive Crypto from their relatives abroad. The censorship of the government is not possible, since they are not routed through a bank or a third party, instead, it reaches the wallet in a peer-to-peer manner. Then, moments later, you can sell your new crypto to fiat through a local exchange in the style of Craigslist, or upload it to a flash drive.
We must pay attention to the dark side of emerging technology. Public intellectuals such as Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk warned that AI and the Bigdata could strengthen tyrants and authoritarians around the world. The regimes in Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia are even trying to mutate and centralize the concept of digital money on an equal footing to create state-controlled cryptomonedas like Petro, which could allow them to more effectively censor transactions and monitor the accounts of the users and evade sanctions.
But the decentralization of technologies can provide a counterforce. By building and investing in tools such as Signal and Tor, cryptocurrencies that preserve privacy like Zcash and Monero, mesh network devices such as goTenna and censorship-resistant storage systems such as IPFS. We can guarantee that our cities, social networks and financial systems do not become monitoring and control tools.
Money in paper or metal, being virtually anonymous, remains one of the best ways to exercise freedom of expression because it can be used without government oversight. But in Venezuela, cash is becoming less practical, and is vulnerable to theft or seizures.
"It is vital that we adopt electronic money as a tool to preserve the quality of money among peers for future generations. With the evolution of Blockchain platforms, each day will be easier to use and more accessible."
Less than 1% of the world population (no more than 40 million people) has used Bitcoin. But, according to the Human Rights Foundation, more than 50% of the world's population lives under an authoritarian regime. If we invest time and resources to develop easy-to-use wallets, more exchanges and better educational materials, we will have the potential to make a real difference for the 4 billion people who can not trust their rulers or who can not access the banking system.
As it is for the Venezuelans, for them also the Crypto can be a way out.
@juanmolina