Bitcoin Forum

http://www.businessinsider.com/argentines-escaping-currency-controls-with-bitcoins-2013-3

This is huge.

If BTC spreads in some small countries which don't like USA and want to be independent, it may become a secondary currency in some of them.

The fact is that there people love the USD, they historical used it to hoard against the endemic argentine inflation.

Oh, i failed apparently. Don't mind me, nothing to see here.

Actually it is currently illegal to buy USD in Argentina (well so restricted that it is impossible).
This has caused a black market (Blue dollar), whoch is 50% more costly than the official rate (and increasing, 2 years ago, there was no difference).

So though most Argentineans would love to have BTC, for them it equals USD : hard and expensive to get...

No, they can get Bitcoins through localbitcoins.com

Ha, that is an interesting site. But it does not solve the underlying problem I outlined: the prices here are based on the Blue Dollar rate, so in order to get this value Argentinians need to first sell dollars and use the AR$ to buy BTC at inflated prices, or use USD, which are impossible to obtain at the official price. So they will be stuck with the 50% mark-up in any way.

Don't forget that the official AR$ (in which all salaries are paid) is no more accepted (some places in Chile do, but at half value) nor sold outside Argentina, it has become a fake currency. Argentinians can also not use their ATM cards abroad to get cash. The only thing left to do is buy stuff in Chile or Uruguay with a bank card, in which case the government 'only' charges an immediate 15% tax.

And when they get paid in ARS, they can use those to buy BTC. No dollars involved. Plenty of sellers on localbitcoins.com asking ARS only.

Yes. Currently about 250 USD per BTC against official rate, which are all salaries based on. See the problem now?

Which is, of course, irrelevant if all you want to do, as the title says, is escape government control. Who cares how much ARS you pay for a Bitcoin, as long as you get more ARS for the same Bitcoin later on.

The Argentne story hasn't really changed. Replace pesos with Australes, replace dollars with Bitcoins and you have 1988/1989 all over again (and that was 1976 all over, which was 1970 all over, and so on).

Beauty of Bitcoin, government controls can't touch it.

In their place I would buy Radeons and mine the sh*t out of them.

They can't do much of that either because once they use more than a given (small) amount of electricity their rate charged goes up quite high. They would be better to import ASICs. Or as I heard from an Argentinian a few days back wait for the Avalon chips to start selling and import chips to make boards in the country.

Imported electronics are also obnoxiously expensive in Argentina, often 2-3 times the typical market prices, not that GPU mining bitcoins would do them much good anymore.

GPU mining right now is the most profitable it's been in a long time. Not that it will last though. You'd want to be able to get cards cheap or have a gamer market to dump them into, which may be possible in Argentina if they are hard to get initially.