"Venezuela’s inflation will skyrocket to 1 million percent by the end of the year as the government continues to print money to cover a growing budget hole, the International Monetary Fund predicted on Monday."
If you're not talking about the government, who obviously like printing money, then the issue is that people are paid in the local currency and have no choice and shops may be forced to accept it. The black market has long ago dealt in USD. Bitcoin doesn't help anyone since people don't have enough money to eat, let alone buy computers or mobile phones. Also Bitcoin is not a hard, ie stable, currency.
Really though, many Venezuelans have turned to crypto. There are more sales in Venezuela than in China according to localbitcoins data, and a lot of them are buying mining equipment because energy is still heavily subsidized:
The question was originally buried but one of its premises is really good: to the extent bitcoin has some utility eventually, it's about putting a floor on gross macroeconomic malpractice like in Zimbabwe or Venezuela. It can give people a currency to flee to in emergencies. One that is easier to get and store and harder to seize than dollars.
The real question is why aren't even more Venezuelans using it. Whatever is preventing mass adoption in a crisis should be what cryptocurrency experiments should probably focus on, and most probably involve tradeoffs with crypto idealism. Things like:
1. Value stability. Maybe you can get that with more competing tethers.
2. Predictable and low transaction costs. Maybe let ideal clearing rates, target tx per min, affect round length.
3. More usable, but trustworthy implementations. Ie, dead simple, never see any keys. Bitcoin needs whatever Dropbox did to rsync.
4. Better options to do off chain transactions without deposits for counterparties where you have some trust, or know you can go back to that shop or person if they double spend.
5. Some system of revocation for the most extreme and undisputed fraud or thefts.
6. Wallet penetration. How cheap can a specialized wallet device or phone with an app get?
Some of those would irritate bitcoin purists, but they are the things that make people trust your system.
Some cryptocurrency will probably offer those things at some point and fall on its face just to prove me wrong, we'll see.
> Who do you think has access to lots of subsidized electricity...
It's a great question, and an incredibly quick reply!
I would like some time to consider it carefully, but recommended you check out the article I originally linked which includes more details in the meantime.
Is not that they don't have money to eat, they don't have enough food to eat. As I see it, at the hear of the issue is broken economics. Sound money, like bitcoin, could be a great solution to several problems of economics of Venezuela.
> bitcoin, could be a great solution to several problems of economics of Venezuela
Bitcoin's volatility is the opposite of what Venezuela needs. About the only proven solution for hyperinflating countries with poor institutions is a currency board [1]. You peg the local currency 1:1 to an external currency. If that doesn't work, you switch to a hard currency.
Even if we assume Tether to remain stable, that doesn't solve the fundamental problem of even getting someone to buy local currency in exchange for fake Dollars.
If you're not talking about the government, who obviously like printing money, then the issue is that people are paid in the local currency and have no choice and shops may be forced to accept it. The black market has long ago dealt in USD. Bitcoin doesn't help anyone since people don't have enough money to eat, let alone buy computers or mobile phones. Also Bitcoin is not a hard, ie stable, currency.