Bitcoin Forum

Another great opportunity for Bitcoin, let's get decommissioned B-52 and carpet bomb them with flyers ;)

http://thenextweb.com/la/2012/09/13/paypal-set-suspend-domestic-transactions-argentina/

I think the first big test will be Argentina: Brutal (and growing) inflation + brutal (and growing) control to capital flows + literate population = Bitcoin explosion!

No, but seriously, shouldn't we set up some kind of promo team to raise awareness about Bitcoin? Argentina looks like an excellent opportunity to test it.

according to google, argentina has a GDP of $445 billion.. 4000x more than all bitcoins :)

It's great opportunity, but I don't have much hope for breakthrough. We already celebrated Italy's move to restrict cash transactions to 300 euro or so, but according to my (limited) knowledge nothing came out of it, and I pretty much expect the same in Argentina's case. Actually, if Bitcoin gained any momentum there, it is likely that their government would try to block it, if anything Argentina could be the first country to ban Bitcoin in such case.

The article says "As of October 9th, " so this restriction isn't in place just yet.

What I am curious about is:


I wonder how many other countries are like that too.

So if they were willing to accept PayPal for payment, their thinking must have been that since it has spending power it can be accepted instead of cash -- simply as a store of value.  So the move from PayPal to Bitcoin shouldn't be that much of a leap to them then.

Just last week was the crackdown in Argentina on the use of credit cards to take advantage of the difference between the black market exchange rate for the local currency (ARS) versus the official, regulated rate.  Jon Matonis' article on it:

 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/04/argentina-begins-tracking-all-credit-cards/

What can be bought in Argentina is UKash -- which can be used at Bitcoin Nordic and Mercabit.ue (Actually, Bitcoin Nordic accept CashU, but funds from UKash can be loaded to a CashU account, and then transferrred to Bitcoin Nordic.)

 - http://www.BitcoinNordic.com
 - http://www.Mercabit.eu

Other than that, there are no good cash-out methods in Argentina nor currency exchanges, though ARS is an asset on GLBSE for electronic pesos.  The way it works is that your 1 share of ARS is backed by 1 peso kept in a bank.  You can redeem yoru shares of ARS and request physical delivery.

But also, there is account-to-account (A2A) transfer on GLBSE, so you can essentially trade pesos (ARS) by transferring shares using GLBSE (small transaction fees can apply for larger transfers).

 - https://glbse.com/asset/view/ARS
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91814.0

How?

The ARS fund works beautifully, but in Argentina nobody wants to leave a trail, therefore people tend to buy bitcoins to trusted vendors.

There are very little resources in Spanish and Italian about Bitcoin. There are some, but almost no quality video/research is ever posted in anything other than English and Russian. Majamalu did put together some stuff though, in written form.

The incentive to create resources in other languages is rather small. Foreigners who are truly comfortable in English would rather discuss and contribute stuff in English, instead of going through the toil of translating stuff for little or no personal gain. There are some individual and collective efforts, but they will take time to be significant.

It was easier to get into Bitcoin when mining wasn't such a specialised operation. Now, for most people it means going through foreign banks and exchanges, giving your details, your credit card etc. The kind of people who are the most interested in something like Bitcoin tend not to enjoy that, or at least not as a first step. When I talk to people from Spain, France, Italy, Greece... (which I do here in the UK because my office is very international) you can tell they start losing interest when they realise they need to do stuff like bank transfers or getting very specific hardware to just be "in it". They also don't want to meet strangers to buy something they still don't quite understand, or to pay a premium for using UKash or other stuff they also don't know most of the time. So this is a very long and slow process. Bitcoin has also been very volatile this year, so when people are looking for a safe refuge they'd stay away from something that can go up or down 30% in no time, they go for gold and silver. These are all the rage in Europe now.

Well, not everyone in Europe is as hard to convince.

A dentist in Finland accepts it.  That dentist and maybe staff can spend them at Vegemesta sandwich shop which also accepts it.  
 - http://vegemesta.com/

Room 77 in Kreuzberg Germany accepts it.   In addition to locals who mine, tourists might specifically patronize the place.

Carena Bar in Greece:
 - http://bitcoin.travel/carena-bar-restaurant/

B&B Del Corso in Napoli
 - http://bitcoin.travel/bb-del-corso/

Even at 2,700 meters up bitcoin is accepted.

https://i.imgur.com/mlKtZ.jpg

 - http://rojacherhuette.mascht.com/


So ... it seems tourism-related businesses are the first to accept bitcoins.  Presumably, they pay their staff and expenses in fiat so anyone local offering to buy the bitcoins off their hands for them probably now has a local supply.

But seriously ,...  you think doing a SEPA transfer to BitSTAMP is really too hard?
 - https://it.bitstamp.net  <-- Italian translation.

I'm not saying "everybody", I have introduced a few myself. I'm European as well. I'm just saying it won't be neither easy nor a massive and instant migration into bitcoin. That's simply not going to happen because of the barriers I mentioned before. It will take a long time.

F#$% I hate paypal.

And one more reason why Bitcoin will get traction in Argentina: Nothing in the world makes you question the true nature of money more than hyperinflation. There are enough Argentines around who still remember 1989-1991 (and the three decades before). Bitcoin will resonate with them.

My theory is that in these countries like Argentina bitcoin will be huge success, because:

- Easier to transfer than dollars/euros/other foreign currencies
- Cash and other valuables can be confiscated at the border, bitcoin can't
- Many people in these countries dream of moving to somewhere else, and bitcoin is the ultimate tool for that -  it is fairly easy to convert bitcoins to other currencies in any developed country.

Obligatory localbitcoins link: https://localbitcoins.com/country/AR

Actually Italy limited cash to 50 Euros recently. But I too don't see much good coming for bitcoins -no one is really going to bother with learning something so different from what they use to know, unless there is a really user friendly way to approach it -and a very compelling reason to bother, such as imminent default or dramatic exchange rate drop.


Nearest seller is 70 km away -mhh, I could become one myself :) Still not nearly user-friendly enough for the casual user, though.

Blocking bitcoin traffic maybe?
If your answer is encrypted tunneling then they can block that.
If your answer is use Tor then they can block access to Tor.
In any case, they have enough points of attack to cripple general bitcoin use.

Short: "They could block bitcoin by disabling internet". Good luck with that :D

It is not trivial to block tor, for example. China has been pretty succesful with it, but they have enormous resources compared to country like Argentina...

AFAIK most of the consumer parts of the internet do not require tor or encrypted tunnels so they will not be disabling internet as used by most people.
Most ISPs in the world have filtering capabilities, it has become the defacto standard.
This can be used to recognise unencrypted bitcoin traffic.
They can also recognise encrypted traffic and filter that.
TOR servers are known and can be blocked on IP basis.

And i'm not saying they must block all of the traffic, they just need to block it enough to make bitcoin impractical.

They have a very long history of currency instability, but they'd much rather go for something that they know, that they can use easily and that's not as volatile at bitcoin: the dollar is king in Argentina. And after the dollar, other fiat currencies or precious metals. Bitcoins are nowhere in their psyche.

I would hope if this becomes the case that really smart people will come up with ingenious ways of using steganography and other protocol obfuscation to make this harder than catching a greased pig. But AFAIK nobody has made very strong attempts to do this yet as most protocol obfuscation is easily defeated.

You should!  The only way for a currency to become popular is for people to start advertising that they will accept or trade it.  If using the exchanges is complicated in Argentina then its doubly important.

Remember: buying dollars or gold is now banned in Argentina.

But as you know very well, this doesn't stop it.

But predisposes people to consider alternatives.

Not necessarily, but a strong distaste for the US might  :D

I would love to hear this talk.  Does anyone know if it is being recorded?

50 Euros? I think it's 1000Euros.

Actually they only increase demand every time they restrict it, they can lower actual trade but not demand. Quite naturally, too.

There's a thread about it. Last time I checked it was actually 50, but it seems improbable practically.

Yeah, true. But bitcoin is still there, and although not very understable, its properties are superior to any other alternative such as gold or dollars. In the long run people will see this. Meanwhile the early adopters will start to use it and benefit.

There is a lot of talk about bringing Bitcoin to new users. Especially user-friendliness is of importance. I think there is quite some money to be made by investing in a more user-friendly approach to Bitcoin.

Why haven't we seen, for example, a wallet client with built-in buy/sell bitcoin function? As in, Mt.Gox in your wallet. I am a 100% sure this would greatly facilitate life for new adopters.

Actually there has been MtGox Android client for at least half an year or so, maybe even longer. It is pretty crappy, but still :D (always crashed when I tried it, nowadays I don't use mtgox any more).

This is pretty critical, if something goes wrong the wallet is responsible for your loss. Also, you still need to set up your personal data and bank account to transfer to MtGox or whatever exchange it is.

Showing the current exchange rates should be easy enough though. That and a couple links to exchanges and sites like bitcoincharts. The wallet could come with some introduction and a few pointers.

Exchange clients and wallets are very distinct things.

here is a new service. 
https://qikcoin.com/verify

requires a verified account and a mobile phone.

it is still in beta so there are only nominal amounts available
but it is fully functional and secure.

At very least with minimal effort they could forbid cash transactions between banks and known Bitcoin exchanges and vendors. This is quite effective, won't stop everybody but it will work for majority of people.

Good attitude, but in this case hate corrupt Argentinian government. You can say many things about Paypal but not that they work towards reducing their user base (not consciously at least, lol).

You are comparing apples and oranges here. The GDP is not an equivalent measurement to the number of a currency.

Encrypted traffic like the SSL people use to access their banks? This doesn't work.

Far from all Tor relays are knows. Many are being kept secret and shared with people who need them. These relays are called bridges (https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en).

It does, actually, because encrypting the traffic does not hide the obvious patterns of that traffic. Encrypted bitcoin traffic will look much different from encrypted SSL bank traffic, and it will be pretty obvious until people start focusing their efforts on steganography and/or protocol obfuscation. Not simple tasks, and not efficient uses of bandwidth either.

To those saying that bitcoin can be easily blocked: Shouldn't it be easier to stop bittorrent than bitcoin?

UKash is not an option. There is just one company selling coupons and only in Buenos Aires.

Me and a few others are already buying/selling bitcoins at bitcoinary.

https://www.bitcoinary.com/en/users/718/profile
https://www.bitcoinary.com/en/users/1174/profile

As for the acceptance, a lot of us are confused and many think you can only get bitcoins by mining. There are a few discussions on reddit to read:

http://www.reddit.com/r/argentina/comments/zrjma/hay_otra_soluci%C3%B3n_a_los_dolares_bitcoin/
http://www.reddit.com/r/argentina/comments/ztf3h/bitcoins_che/

We certainly need to promote Bitcoin here and make people understand it can really work.

Regards!

No one has made an effort to stop bittorrent that I know of, only throttle it. And there are many legitimate uses for torrents. I don't see why one would be particularly easier or harder than the other to block.

AFAIK BitTorrent is far from being throttled. Arguably the exact opposite is true.

I don't know how you could possibly argue that the opposite is true unless you think that bittorrent traffic impedes other traffic, which is possible I suppose.

But ISPs have most definitely attempted to throttle bittorrent traffic.

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-throttling-internet-providers-exposed-111020/

It's just as easy, but people generally think it's unethical and so usually ISPs only throttle it.
If a country realy wants to stop large scale distributed networks (and that is what we are talking about) then nothing can stop it.

Pics or it didn't happen  ;D

Well, i live in the netherlands and most ISPs throttle torrent traffic in one way or another.
There is nothing, besides their ethics and competition (ISPs are not very state controlled here), to prevent them from blocking it alltogether.

We were talking about argentina.
You think that protests would prevent the government there from blocking something they wanted?
And i agree that civil unrest would escalate and bitcoin would not be the reason for it.
If information flow is hampered to such degree a country has bigger problems than their monetary system.

To my experience, ISP:s even advertise their services as a fast way to get movies and music. It is also highly competitive environment, at least in Finland. I'm pretty sceptical that ISPs would block bittorrent altogether, since bittorrent is one of the most important reasons why people buy fast internet connections from ISPs.

They are probably doing throttling because of profits, not because of censorship/laws.

Yes, but again, we are talking about the future of argentina here.
I gave the example of the netherlands purely from a technical point of view because people said it was technically unfeasible.

If you really think the Argentine government can block the Bitcoin network (or, for that matter, can do anything else that requires even a mildly sophisticated degree of organization), then you clearly have never been to the place  ;D

I suspect not even Germany would be able to fully block the network, certainly the Chinese haven't been, but Argentina? We are here, and you're out to lunch somewhere.

I recommend all of you upvote this right away (and contribute if you can speak spanish!):

http://www.reddit.com/r/argentina/comments/ztf3h/bitcoins_che/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/argentina/comments/ztf3h/bitcoins_che/)