Currency controls mean "we the govt. say our currency is worth x USD and you must transact at that rate" which kills the market and means zero USD sellers.
I'd expect the USD to Bolivar rate via bitcoin to be significantly more Bolivar to USD than the "official" rate. In a sense this is nothing especially new in markets. You could always get a wildly more favourable rate for your USD behind the iron curtain on the black market. Local currency is worth something, people will take it at some value. Even zimbabwe, just add a bunch of zeroes...
Bitcoin can help to make that more fair and here is an example. An example is a person that works for a company abroad from Venezuela . If he does what is supposed to do, he will get paid in dollars but with a wire transfer but the local bank gives bolivar at the official rate only and won't be able to buy dollars back.
On the other hand there is always another person that needs to get dollars, to travel or to pay something.
One way to solve this issue is with Bank accounts abroad, the first person get paid on an account in a bank outside Venezuela, then he wire to the second person acc abroad. In exchange the second person pay in bolivar at a good rate to the first one. In the black market it sometimes call "wire dollar" or cable dollar.
Bitcoin can makes this easier because is more tangible, you can meet someone at any place and move the bitcoins from phone. It requires less trust between the parties.
The money always go where it wants to go, there is no way to regulate.
Xe.com exchange rate is currently 1 USD = 6.29 VEF
So you would expect 1 BTC to be worth around 350*6.29 = 2,201 VEF.
Yet on localbitcoins Caracas they sell for more than 20 times that much:
https://localbitcoins.com/places/570916/caracas-ve/
It seems like a tremendous arbitrage opportunity, if only there was a way to sell Bolivars.
Anyways, if I am ever to travel to Venezuela, I will come with Bitcoins.
Or they buy dollars at the 6.9 rate, claim they are importing farming machinery for $2-3million. Then they buy one tractor for $50k, pay off the corresponding govt official, and keep the difference. And I'm not making this up. They recently tried to arrest 2 or 3 guys on this (they probably didn't pay enough) and they just fled to Miami and Panama.
If you come to venezuela, bring dollars. You will always find someone that will buy them at the black market rate of almost Bs.100 per dollar. You could live like a king here with $1000 for quite a while.
It used to be crazy before, if you paid in Bolivars it was only 100 dollars vs 600 dollars if you paid in USD. Fun fact, even if you were paying in Bolivars way less, you still used to get Marriott points as if you were spending 600 dollars a night, so the quickest way to get a lot of points was staying at the Caracas Marriott.
Having said that, I have yet to hear about anyone bypassing the regulations by using bitcoins. Is still not that hard finding someone selling dollars.
This would solve the problem of shortage of physical us dollars.... Or in the case that you have the ability to request bitcoin can you simply request virtual us dollars just as easily? ( are there restrictions against this? )
The only way around this would be if Venezuelans were to mine their own bitcoins, but given that most of the mining equipment is sold either in USD or BTC, it's just a catch 22.
So no, there is no bitcoin economy in Venezuela and as long as they keep their strict capital controls in place, there won't be any kind of economy in Venezuela.