Re:Tether: The Story So Far
by ALittleLight on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:45PM
(#21382993)
How do the people receiving your remittances cash them out to something usable? Is there a Venezuelan local bitcoins thing?
Yes there is, sometimes they don't even remit but rather use btc. I send $10 a month to ~5 people in Venezuela and it's one of the only ways now to help out and/or live there
Can you provide more detail on how they actually use the bitcoin? Genuinely curious as in most countries the use cases are very limited, and there is a large cut when converting into/out of bitcoin that doesn't make it worth it.
There was solid episode of Odd Lots on cryptocurrency usage in Venezuela.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/here-s-ho...
Yep, Localbitcoins is usually the way.
There are also a few shops (even one very large shop) accepting some cryptos now, like BTC and Dash. I'm not sure what volume they are seeing in sales though.
I'm not sure how many people here use BTC as a means of preserving the value of their money since most people would rather hold USD, but for sending remittances, it cannot be beat.
As another interesting anecdote, my sister is in Argentina and a bunch of friends started asking her how to buy BTC before the election yesterday. Seems that those that managed to move their Argentine pesos to BTC did so just in time: https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/argentina-central-bank-cu...