Cryptos are being used as a way of payment and then via a series of conversions and exchanges (to the point that it is ridiculous what we have to do to avoid being robbed by our government) we get our national currency for our daily groceries, bitcoin acceptance is still extremely rare here afaik.
And it's mainly freelancers, IT workers, designers, etc. But the number of people who work this way is increasing every year since we are running out of options as well (no jobs besides delivery apps, working for the state doing basically nothing, etc.).
Kinda related: IT companies from our country are already complaining that there is an "unfair" competition because we get paid, for example 2000 USD, which is a very low sum for IT workers abroad but is a huge number for us while these companies can't even compete with that number for the same employee.
So I believe sooner or later the government will take advantage of their complains to try, somehow, to control the money inflow from people who work for companies abroad.
Most probably, the average salary here is about 5000-6000USD/year if you're lucky and have a legally registered job(about 5-10% of the population). Most people have informal jobs and make less than that.
> Do you know how much a talented computer programmer gets paid in Argentina (or is that what you mean by IT)?
I have a friend working for MercadoLibre at a senior engineer position and last time we talked he was making almost 1000USD/month. I work remotely for a foreign company and make 4000USD/month having half of his experience.
> I'm thinking that Argentina seems like a good place to go to start a startup. What do you think? What problems would I run into aside from language?
As much as I'd love for this country to move forward, companies are leaving more than coming to the country, it's a TERRIBLE place for startups due to:
1. Aggressive taxing that gets worse and worse every year that passes
2. Terribly slow times for legal processes, like getting your paperwork done to start your company
3. We have a track record of the state wanting to confiscate bank funds
4. Depending on the trade you choose, you might face heavy opposition from the current monopolies, like it already happened with taxi unions against Uber, or MercadoLibre putting pressure to prevent Ebay from coming to the country.
Maybe if you come from a wealthy country it may not seem like too much of an issue as it might look cheap, but I personally tried to have small business multiple times and time and time again some new government measure or tax or government change made it unsustainable.
This is exactly what would happen if Argentinians started using cryptocurrency in large numbers, and the government found out about it.
A government that wants tight control over currency exchange will treat crypto the same way it treats other foreign currency: limit exchange, or ban it, etc.
Last time I checked, blocking ports, domains, IP ranges, et al was trivial in China.
A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished.
Likewise, the inverse is also true. CB radio was illegal in the UK, but it was hugely popular, then, overnight, upon it being made legal, it died. Most people lost interest because it was no longer exciting. You see the same thing with legalizing cannabis. Sure, you'll get hardcore consumers and enthusiasts, and people using it for medical reasons, but it's no longer cool/edgy/interesting, and when it is so accessible.
Could really go either way, but when it comes to money, people don't tend to fuck around.
If you think crypto is gone from China, I tihnk you may be mistaken.
Argentina isn't the US or UK. There was a video an Argentinian pointed out to me of a vendor selling black-market goods right in front of the tax office. No one gives a fuck. Violating Argentina's insane tax code is sport for their populace. Once you become big enough corruption and ol boy network with the tax authorities will negotiate what percent of your income you lie about, usually you keep like 70% off the books by the account of one accountant from a large construction company I interacted with.
I never said it was gone. Did you read the comment properly?
"A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished."
It definitely is not extremely difficult. Even tangible stuff like pot that doesn't have nearly the value density (you can fit billions of USD crypto on a wallet stored on memory smaller than 1/8th bag of pot) was extraordinarily easy to obtain for me as a kid in a place where it was illegal both by state and federal government's law. And there's no drug dog to sniff it out.
A chinese citizen could laughably easily obtain crypto.
Sure, but this all starts to become far too complex for the average citizen. The average citizen that just about managed to wrap their brain around crypto in a semi-OK UX is going to get caught out.
I know ex-military folks that can survive in the wilderness just fine, but your average person wouldn't, and this is about the 99%, not the 1%.
What next? The phones available in the country have a specific ROM that doesn't offer VPNs? Already happening. Not even accounting for leaks in VPNs, and whether someone can trust a VPN provider. We already know that the major providers sell netflow data.
The average citizen doesn't know wilderness survival because they don't need it to survive and thrive. Throw a dumb 18 year old into the army and they will probably learn it just fine.
Learning to read takes way more time and energy than learning to use crypto behind a VPN, but we do it in part because it makes us successful. Basically every child learns this complex task. It actually turns out that just spending time to practice a procedural task is a perfect substitute for intelligence, for many many tasks. I think obfuscating traffic is one of those where maybe some people will take a lot longer than others but almost everyone could learn. If VPN or tor becomes a critical component to someones livelihood they will learn to do it or someone will profit from dumbing it down enough that they're able to.
This comment packs a surprising number of misunderstandings into a single short sentence.
China outlawed crypto mining early last year, resulting in a two-thirds drop in the hashrate within a month. Even then, the order of magnitude was wrong for it to be "the best way of exporting coal," which by the way China is a large net importer of; https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index estimates the whole Bitcoin network at 14 GW, but China's electrical production averages 850 GW, and overall energy consumption is some 4500 GW, 2500 of which is still coal.
So, at best, China could only have been exporting about 1% of its coal consumption in the form of Bitcoin (though in fact much of its Bitcoin mining was renewables-powered), and now it has mostly stopped doing even that.
No, according to https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57811959, only about 7% of the hashrate moved to Kazakhstan (probably about 1 GW), which (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kazakhstan#Electrici...) only has about 10 GW of total electrical generation (out of 20 GW capacity). Coal just isn't competitive for bitcoin mining unless you can get someone else to pay for it, even when the plant is already built, so Bitcoin miners are in no position to fund the expansion of Kazakhstan's coal-burning generation network.
The hashrate fell 53%, hitting bottom in July, didn't finish recovering until December, and still isn't consistently above its pre-prohibition peak, so "much of the drop in the hashrate" wasn't picked up by anybody.
Tangible drugs have inherent value: once you have the physical object, you can get high in the privacy of your own home with no further interaction with anyone.
Cryptocurrency, fiat currencies, and arguably even metal coins derive their value from the existence of a market which will take them. Bring a bitcoin (as in a wallet private key, not the concept) to 1990 and nobody will pay you for it. Therefore, a government doesn't need to ban you owning cryptocurrency - it just needs to crack down on the businesses you would spend it at accepting your cryptocurrency. And it doesn't really even need to ban that, it just needs to crack down on their suppliers, and so forth.
Your local pizza place that takes Bitcoin only accepts it because that money is in turn spendable by them to buy flour and oil and cheese - either directly, or by giving it to someone who will give them local currency with which they can buy flour and oil and cheese. If the government presses hard enough on those links, your local pizza place will stop taking Bitcoin, and then they won't have to ban you from owning Bitcoin at all, you won't be able to do anything with it.
Not starting a holy war (and endless discussions about the nature of pizza and whether the Truth is in Rome, Naples, or New York), but it is quite common to put some oil in the dough. It makes it easier to work with, more homogeneous, lighter (but thicker), and it cooks a bit different.
While "banning crypto" is a challenging task, making cryptocurrency useless in your jurisdiction is extremely easy.
prohibit any business to accept crypto as payment, ban crypto exchanges from operating in your country, ban banks of your country to accept transaction that they suspect coming from cryptocurrency exchanges
You can still have your crypto wallet, but what use is it if you can't exchange it in your local currency? You can always meet someone in an ally or travel outside the country and bring cash back in but these are solutions that don't scale.
They do scale and you merely have to witness the insane amount of black-market trade between relatively low tax Paraguay and Brazil/Argentina to see that. The border between Argentina and Paraguay doesn't even have passport controls most the time, let alone customs.
Also just because crypto can't be spent by most local vendors doesn't mean it's not valuable. Stocks can't be spent either but if you had a traditional bearer certificate like in the old days (paper stock with no owner except by merely holding the paper) it was just fine for trade and people did just that in the Weimar Republic when they had hyperinflation.
Worst case you can just spend the crypto in foreign location, import the goods and sell them locally.
Aren't Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina in the same trade union? I don't know the details of Mercosur but in the EU you can buy whatever you want in any other EU country and take it back home without the need for customs. Where is the black market part of that trade?
As for your trade example I would like to see the details of that.
There are not a lot of vendors that accept crypto and those who do, use 3rd parties which then usually require some amount of KYC (even if it's is minimal). Combine that with how many vendors are actually able/willing to ship to the country in question and you are left with a very small set of online stores. Add shipping costs and custom fees that will eat in your margin. So yes in theory you can setup an import/export company empire in order to exchange your crypto into local currency but that is pretty much the definition of "not scaling".
My point is: if a country wants to make cryptocurrency useless they can totally do it.
I'm not aware of all the customs details in Mercosur but if it is like EU then I would just spend all crypto in Paraguay and then bring gold or whatever back through without customs on other side. Lots of commodities that are high density you can carry on your person and fit a decade of Argentina wages on your person in a single <$100 bus ride.
If you need to cross a border to fetch your hard currency (or equivalent amount of goods) then what is the value add of using crypto compared to, say, opening a bank account in Montevideo and making a bank transfer?
They have dollar-bill-sniffing dogs on the ferryboat to Montevideo, so being able to cross any border rather than one specific border is a pretty big win. But actually, lots of Venezuelan refugees right here in Argentina buy Bitcoin to send to their families back in Venezuela, or the families of other Venezuelan refugees who pay them, and all the black-market currency changers are trying to get into Bitcoin now. A lot of them are still confused about the difference between Bitcoin, Tether, and Binance, though.
I'm still kind of baffled here why Montevideo was brought up (not by you but above) on a thread regarding Paraguay. Montevideo is in Uruguay. The border between Paraguay and Argentina was used specifically because it is so porous and doesn't work well for sniffing dogs. Getting to Uruguay on the other hand would require a ferry or boat, or a swim. If I'm not mistaken.
You can get to Uruguay by bridges, too, but it takes a lot longer if you're coming from Buenos Aires or going to Montevideo, and you can't get there from Paraguay without crossing into Argentina or Brazil first. Montevideo was presumably brought up because Argentines bank in Uruguay, not Paraguay. Nobody banks in Paraguay.
I have availed my self of using a Paraguay bank. Seemed fine to me. I do not have a account there. They exchanged my USD for any peso I like just fine.
Is there a reason why no one banks in Paraguay? There is a dude standing by the bank with a shotgun waiting to blow the head off of any robber, I felt very safe there and their service was quite professional and honest. More so than the street exchangers. I wouldn't have hesitated to open an account there if I needed to.
The dude standing by the bank with a shotgun isn't going to accompany you even to your AirBnB, much less until you leave the country. He needs to be there to keep people from robbing the bank, but it's not his problem if someone follows you home from the bank and robs you there.
There may be other reasons. Here in Argentina 21 years ago the government confiscated all dollar-denominated bank deposits and replaced them 1-to-1 with pesos, which you weren't allowed to withdraw more than a few at a time, so you had to watch helplessly as your money lost 75% of its value overnight. If I had to guess which South American countries something like that would happen in next, I'd pick Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina again, in that order. But that's not because I have deep knowledge of Paraguayan politics, so I could be wrong.
I brought it up because it’s close to Buenos Aires and because I’m under the impression that Uruguay is a pretty well run place. I’m assuming there to already be a lot of connections, personal and trade, between the two metro areas. I’ve never been to either and anything beyond geography is guesswork on my part. Anyway, thanks for the clarifications :)
The presumption absolutely no one will trade you crypto in your own country and you can't just mail out or in cash somehow seems like a pretty steep one (particularly in Argentina where black market trade of USD and all array of other stuff is rampant); but you must surely see the different between having your cash stored in a private wallet vs a bank account with a country that quite likely has tax and other legal treaties with your own.
I can't imagine it would be a warm feeling for someone with tax liabilities in Argentina to have a white-market bank account in a friendly country nearby.
Also my girlfriend points out that possibly there's less financial surveillance in Paraguay, and if you travel to Uruguay everything is more expensive, whereas Paraguay is poor so everything is cheap. But still AFAIK nobody here banks in Paraguay because you get robbed there.
I'd think they can ban cryptocurrency about as effectively as they can ban foreign currency (which is to say, not very). If you're willing and able to break that particular law, it's not really an argument in favor of cryptocurrency.
You think smuggling tangible goods is easier than smuggling digital goods? I think it's an incredible argument in favor of cryptocurrency. Smugglers who break the law like to minimize risk.
The commenter already says that there’s a black market for converting pesos to USD, which is forbidden . I’m guessing a lot of that happens in person with cash? I can’t imagine the government could enforce a ban on cryptocurrencies any more effectively than it currently can with cash.
China may have banned crypto 'publicly' but by design they would have a hard time truly banning it given that wallet addresses aren't associated with personal identity and blockchains which don't make transactions easily browsable exist too.
Their ban has the effect of preventing centralized exchanges from providing services in China. But there's no practical way for them to crack down on decentralized exchanges and/or people trading them in-person.
In the above hypothetical case, if his government were to ban use of crypto, he'd still be better off in the sense that the government isn't going to be able to just find the coins hidden in a mattress the way they might with physical money. It'd be illegal either way, but one way would be much harder to trace.
This is of course ignoring the volatility involved in holding crypto, which somewhat weakens the stated benefit given that the goal seems to be to avoid volatility of the local currency.
Many governments forbid getting paid cash under the table, especially without a visa.
I believe history will show cryptocurrency to be even more resilient than cash as an international, sometimes private, means of transferring value between individuals.
People will do what it takes to survive. Regulations can slow but never stop “illegal” workers.
China already did, what's to stop yours?