I think so actually because none of the reasons for Brazil's economic crisis shows signs of going away soon. Of course, in this globalized world it is also important to take into account what is going on in the US and Asia.

What I haven't understood yet is how much or how little does Brazil's economy depends on imports for everyday goods. As I wrote before the prices on the street (at least in Rio) have been staying stable. US/EU tourists rejoice as for them everything is extremely affordable!

Indeed, I advise people who have the capacities to flee to BTC. Of course, the latter needs to be eyed closely.

Holding USD is funnily a bit unpractical as one would need to keep cash. First the exchange places are expensive and secondly you don't want to walk around with stashes of money in Brazil.

Setting up an account on an Brazilian BTC exchange is rather simple. Create an account, send a copy of a utility bill and within two days its done. Setting up online banking (important to work with the exchange) involves going to your bank getting a bunch of papers and numbers and then it is a matter of typing the right stuff into web forms. I saw someone doing this and I find that it is made difficult to keep average people away from trying.

Hi all together,
I am an expat living in Brazil for around a year now. I've been following what is happening to the value of the brazilian Real closely.

A few days ago the former historic low of 3.96 BRL for one USD was reached and on September 24th it went to as far as 4.24 BRL/USD. The brazilian economy goes through a crisis because of (non-exhaustive list):
 - low oil price
 - economic struggle of an important trade partner: China
 - corruption scandal in the contry's biggest oil company PetroBras
 - (...)

I am skimming the internet every day for news on the economic situation and am also talking to locals. So far the people around me do not seem concerned (prices four domestic produce still stays stable). Big mourning, of course, for those who want to go abroad now. I only have information about the Rio de Janeiro area. If you live somewhere else in the country I am interested to hear what people think there.

Trading volumes for BTC on brazilian exchanges is veeeery low compared to Bitstamp/Bitfinex and the like. As such a little move of BTC's value together with a change of the Real's price causes the BTC/BRL pair to jump crazily. To say it with one word: v^OL_aT^IL_e  

Out there in the world some people are saying Brazil is becoming the new Greece except that there is no EU to help and population is 20x bigger (11M vs 200M).

So what is this thread about?

If you have substantial information to add (economic situation, advice on how to deal with the crisis, ...), feel free to comment.

I am not asking for investment advice. I don't want to read conspiracy theories.

Let's have a intelligent conversation about what is going in this country and how that fits together with Bitcoin.

... if I were a miner I would just continue filling up the blocks I mine until all UTXOs are spent (by myself or anyone else).

The it means all your giveaway BTCs are belong to us.

Any miner who sees your transaction is confronted with this question: "Should I put this spam transaction into the block so that it benefits someone else or should I direct the coins to my self instead?"

So what would you do if you were a miner?

Scraping the private keys from this thread is dead easy (especially if you use this handy URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=553487;sa=showPosts . Creating the public keys is part of EC-key math magic and then you can look up the UTXOs. So every miner who has a spare minute can simply write a script that modifies the next best incoming spam transaction, set the output value to zero (incoming value turns into a mining fee) and "bye bye".

Disclaimer: I earned 0.11 mBTC (yes, milli-BTC) from two transactions that happened at the beginning of this stress test and that got confirmed. Participating in this folly made me better understand how all this stuff works. I used bitcoinj which I never touched before. Anyone in need of an IT freelancer with bitcoinj knowledge?

I still have one technical question: Some miners started to put the UTXOs from the giveaway into their blocks as 0.0 BTCs transactions. This effectively means the giveaways's BTCs go straight to the miner.

This then means that any pending unconfirmed transaction which mentions the same UTXOs becomes invalid and should be thrown out of the mempool. How is this actually happening? Does each node check all the unconfirmed transactions after a new block is accepted in the chain?

As the private keys are public and as such the UTXOs known. Each node could already proactively throw out those transactions cause miners would always decide in their own favor when confronted with the question: "Should I put this spam transaction into the block so that it benefits someone else or should I direct the coins to my self instead?". Doing so would bring back the mempool size back to normal quickly.

Btw: The people who imported the keys into their normal wallets might be in trouble if the wallet software decides to place incoming BTCs to an address from the giveaway.

So the stress test is over and the honey badger of money didn't care!

Well done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

Should we thank coinwallet for having shown the world that the bitcoin network flawlessly handled this attack? ;-)

Now back to the normal proceeding aka to the moon.

To be honest I find this whole situation funny.

Here and on reddit people were discussing how they can counter-stresstest (aka DDoS) coinwallet by attacking the IPs that create the spam transactions and now the CW.EU people found a cheap way to make sure their test cannot be ddosed. Genius!

... and relying on human greed to make sure the bomb explodes. Very clever move!

I travel a lot and often. I became a travelling nomad last year and a few days ago I decided to not work as an employee anymore but work and travel the world as I want. When I go to some country I have long and profound conversations about what the people think of their country, their culture, their political leaders, the relationship of their country to their neighbors but also its role in the world.

All of these experiences made me realize that people are such victims of their politicians that nourish the nation state idea and use it to sustain their own power.

I think it would be great if bitcoin could take away part of their power.

Imagine: When people demonstrate against something the state is supposedly doing wrong and there is police forces defending then the latter people are not voluntarily doing this job. They do it because they get paid for this. They get paid with the money the government controls and whose use it enforces on the people. And its people who make this money being worth something. With their work, their produce, their lifetime. So the quickest way to defeat the state is to refuse using its money.

Unfortunately a falling exchange rate makes people afraid of refusing government money. I hope some wealthy anti-nation state types have a plan how to stabilise btc one day. ;-)

Hey, compare this to my rather smooth experience with BTC in South America:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=902745

Thanks. I will continue staying in south america (until June 2015) and visit more spanish speaking countries. So far I haven't heard of bitcoin ATMs there. I hope there'll be some cool people on localbitcoins though.

Anyone who reads this, lives in a major South American city and is interested in trading shall get in contact via PM with me. As long as colored paper reigns I need to buy it from time to time. ;-)

Awesome!!!

My contactwas a little late also but I was waiting conveniently in the lobby of my hostel. Surfing the net, chatting with friends, ...

I'd say the point goes to my localbitcoins contact. It was cheaper and more convenient.

Hi all together,

tl;dr: Bitcoin serves MY real world purposes. I am having fun with them in South America. Cool technology. Keep'em buying

I am on this board for a while but had nothing to add to the discussion until now that I have a few personal BTC success stories to share.

I am no microsoft, dell, expedia or whatnot. Just a guy owning some BTC and using them for real word needs. I post my experience, so that other people can share the good news. If you want some proofs of the details, feel free to ask me about it.

I am from a European country and am travelling for many months in South America (will be 10 months in the end). Being involved in Bitcoin made me aware of monetary policies around the world so I checked beforehand how the situation will be in Argentina before going to Buenos Aires.

Because of this I took 1000 US dollar in cash with me. I also brought the credit card of a european bank. Last but not least I prepared an encrypted paper wallet and loaded it with an amount that would allow me to survive in an emergency.

In Bs As, of course, I avoided official conversion offices and credit card withdrawals and instead went to calle Florida instead. It was an interesting experience having to negotiate with the arbolitos. Whenever I needed argentinian cash I checked a website that told me the blue dollar rate and then tried to find a vendor who would sell closest to that value. Easy as pie. I stayed one month in Argentina and, at first, also continued to rely on my dollar bills when going to Uruguay and Brazil.

This however had the side effect that I did not touch my credit card for 6 weeks and I had received it only a short time before the trip. So it happened what had to happen: I was without cash on a Sunday afternoon, wanted to pay something with the CC and when the device asked me for my PIN I noticed that I had no clue what this random number was.

This is where the BTC came into play ...

I started checking localbitcoins to see where I could meet vendors in southern Brazil. There are people in Curitiba, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Upon searching further I found out that Sao Paulo sports South Americas first bitcoin ATM (it is located in the lab88  coworking space in the madalena neighborhood). The other day when I was in the city, I loaded my smartphone with some BTC went to the place and changed money until the machine's daily limit was exhausted. It gave me 1700 RS which was enough for me to get along a while (I am travelling on a budget: hitchhiking + couchsurfing).

The process of getting cash out of the machine was so easy I could not believe. Every official exchange office wanted me to fill out papers, provide a passport, blablabla just to get their local currency in exchange for someone elses. It was the first time I exchanged BTC like this for cash and it was a very powerful feeling: This is bitcoin! The thing that all these "oh so intelligent" bankers, economists and journalists think is a complete crap that cannot and will not work. This is "mtgox desaster" bitcoin that got its end predicted so many times. This is bitcoin - the thing hardly anyone knows in the world!

... I scanned the machine's QR code, send the BTCs and within seconds the machine gave me brazilian reais. Dead easy, no bank, no president of the united states or anyone else involved. The whole process took less than 3 minutes.

A few weeks later I came to Rio de Janeiro and my local cash was about to end soon. I checked localbitcoins and found a seller whom I could contact on Skype. We arranged a meeting in my hostel and I told him that I would like to buy 2000 R$. The next day he came to the place (for which I owed him a service fee of 20 RS which is OK and I think good business strategy on his side). I counted the bills, checked their security features, we agreed on the exchange rate, I send him the BTCs and the deal was set. Again, no bank, no goverment, no third party involved. Perfect!

Another experience: I had bitcoins on my mobile phone using the Android bitcoin app. The other day it got stolen (actually robbed but that is another story). I had a wallet backup prepared and followed the instructions to restore the funds. Wow, imagine! I returned 300 dollars worth in bitcoin from the hands of a thief into my own pocket again BY MYSELF within one hour. No need to call a credit card company, no waiting for anyone but pure reliance on my own capabilities. This is powerful stuff.

While travelling with my paper wallet I realized the following:
- it could contain insane amounts of wealth, no one could stop me from carrying it over a border
- it could get stolen, the thief cannot use it because the private key is encrypted
- I could lose it, I go to a copy shop and print another copy from the file on a USB stick or restored from cloud storage

For me bitcoin is better than:
- cash
- travellers' checks
- credit cards

The process of dealing with BTCs would be so much easier if I had not to rely on nationcal currency at all. In my opinion this is not a problem of the technology but of their users.

I used to be quiet about bitcoin. But all these live experiences with the technology made me realize what insane potential this thing has and I dont see a problem explaining it to people anymore. This turned out to be a good thing: A guy whom I met realized that bitcoin is the way to fund a small but transnational NGO he is about to setup. Perfect - people got inspired.

To the moon!

Extra info:
- before this trip I did not intent do be using Bitcoin or at all being dependent on them. It just happened because I forgot the CC pin.
- kudos to "coinverse" who operate the ATM in Sao Paulo. Keep growing!
- kudos to my fiat provider from Rio!

Disclaimer: I am travelling a lot. I have to deal with visas, border controls, different currencies, residence permits etc etc. By speaking with many people from many countries I have seen how politicians manipulate people in *every* country. All of this made me realize that I don't want to accept any government as my representative. I play by their rules because they force me to but I think they have to go away. I see Bitcoin as a way to take away a large part of their power.