How Venezuela Shows Why Bitcoin, Crypto and Stablecoins Help Everyday People
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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In Venezuela, there are two exchange rates right now. If you, if you believe the government, the government today, I'm looking at the screen, the government right now says $1 is worth $3.21 bolures. In the free market, I. Peer to peer markets, a dollar is trading for $7.80 bolivares. That is a delta of a 143% in value. So you tell me how you're gonna choose to send money to your loved ones.
We're extremely pro Bitcoin. We're extremely pro stable coin. And I think that's the huge opportunity that we have because it's a combination of an elite that really believes on these things and the population who are using these things every single day. So I think that's why Venezuela, everybody has to be extremely optimistic about it.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. The show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. My guess and I, they hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Are you a builder who needs to add on chain trading to your product? The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug and play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto. It's on cha
Hola, Laura. Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Yeah. Oh my gosh. We have so much to discuss. So ever since The US captured former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, there's been a number of rumors swirling about whether or not the regime has tens of billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Whether or not that's true, I I know there's some dispute about that. There there's also this whole history of Bitcoin and crypto and stablecoins in Venezuela we can dive into, And there's a lot of avenues around how all of this news impacts Bitcoin and crypto generally, and also, you know, going the other direction, how Bitcoin and crypto affect kind of,
Yes. So happy to go through that. I wrote a piece on this just because I feel pretty passionately, and I'll give you my my thesis as well as my supporting facts or evidence. So the claims or rumors alleged that Venezuela has a mass of a $60,000,000,000 hoard of Bitcoin, and it lists, three main sources for that Bitcoin. Number one is a gold swap allegedly conducted in 2018 by Mr. Alex Saab, which is who has been a very important figure within the Maduro and Chavez regime. This swap was allegedly done in 2018, and it was to the tune of $2,700,000,000, and Mr. Saab apparently was coordinating th
Is the national oil something something?
Correct. Venezuela, Venezuelan oil company, basically, and so it is the state owned oil company. And to to to highlight why I don't believe any of these, funds went back to the reserves, I would like to highlight one case of extreme corruption out of out of many out of many, but there's one particular case of extreme corruption linking the state owed oil company, but it is a and the crypto regulator, soon agree. And this, the scandal exploded on March 2023, and it revealed that corrupt officials in Venezuela had embezzled $17,600,000,000 through fraudulent sales of oil to the old to the state
Yeah. I mean, all of those are really compelling arguments that you make there. So I would love to hear Jorge's opinion if he why do you think that this rumor, then, of has spread everywhere? I don't know if you saw. CNBC has been making a lot of it. They wrote kind of a long article. It quoted a number of different people who are involved in Bitcoin and crypto in Venezuela. I
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