Item — HN Reader

I'm very sorry for Argentinians - I've been there last year, visiting relatives (I'm from Italy, and my grand aunt moved to Argentina in the 50s - she was a bit over 20 - to escape an arranged marriage in Italy, and came back only in the 80s).

Argentina is a beautiful country, with problems that are very similar to the ones that we have in Italy - but different scenarios, and different economies.

I see this as an opportunity to consider adopting Bitcoin as a national currency, and stop being hostage of 1) banks, and 2) corrupt government officials. I don't know if it would work... But I hope so.

3 comments

Bitcoin would make these problems worse. The whole reason they got into this mess in the first place was by pegging their currency to the dollar, which meant they couldn't devalue the peso when they should have done for a long time; when the eventual reckoning came it was brutal. With bitcoin it would be much much worse, because you can't ever do that decoupling, and you wouldn't even get the US government doing writedowns like QE (which at least mean that in any global financial disaster, you've got a government doing approximately the appropriate things).

Then you just change the price in bitcoins: this was 0.005 bitcoins yesterday? well, today it will be 0.007.

How would that work though? Would the government hand out smart phones to everyone, and offer classes on how to prevent accidentally deleting your life savings?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Bitcoin requires you to go arround with a cellphone and internet 24/7 in order to make payments. That might be a thing in Buenos Aires but definitively not in the rest of the country.

Bitcoin as national currency might work 10 years from now in Sweden or Germany, but definitively not here.

Um. Ever heard of paper-wallets[0]?

[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet