Wow, first I want to thank you for that amazing reference to mint.com. it has a lot of material to my research and my reflection. I sustain everyday a system to explore all these issues, so that it may lead me to better thoughts for my books and other products.

Here we call the bartering "trueque", and it has been practiced much more since the beginning of the economic collapse. However its practice is not so common, and I could mention some causes of that:

First, the bartering is generally an acceptable option if a material culture of a group is based on goods and services that can be produced locally. For example, people outside of big cities practice bartering to exchange their own crops, animals and stuffs generally produced in their community. They used to practice that, even before this economic collapse.

I have linked that phenomenon with the degree of autonomy (material autonomy) that the groups and individuals have in their daily live —from that I grab a philosophical pillar for my work, which I called autonomism—. It's just natural to practice that when your lifestyle and your community involves somehow the constant production of things, which your subsistence is based upon.

So if I eat eggs and my neighbor has chickens, it's natural to give him some apples from my garden in order to get some eggs. But if I work as an accountant and he works as a driver, then the disposition to exchange our services is more difficult. Most of the time we don't have the specific things the other person needs in his daily life.

For that reason, in Venezuela we manage ourselves by another way: The national currency and the national economic dynamics lose everyday more value; so we try to transcend that by placing ourselves onto another economic dynamic. For example, we try to not hold anymore Bolivars (the national currency) and we buy dollars, placing us into a foreign economic dynamic that can guarantee that our money won't lose value from one day to another. We protect the value of our money by buying a foreign, more stable currency.

We also prefer cryptocurrencies, despite their unstability, because the government doesn't control our finances there. All our limits, oppression and prohibitions disappear in the crypto world.

Nonetheless, those are the measures that we take if we have to stay in the country, to make our lives a bit less difficult. Even with those measures, everything is very hard. That's why almost half of the population already leaved the country. Almost every family has many members that emigrated, searching for a better life.