Posts about Bitcoin
Hi guys, as you probably know I'm Venezuelan living here.
Yesterday I had the chance of doing some purchases in a supermarket and paying directly in Bitcoin.
This was the purchase:
The purchase (I had purchased some things before, like fruits and vegetables in farmers market and chicken/meat)You say to the cashier you want to pay in cryptocurrency and their system shows them a selection:
They say they will add more crypto and BTC LN.
After selecting bitcoin and and continue (Continuar) it shows the amount in bitcoin
After that it shows a QR code, you scan it and have to wait for at least one confirmation after you get one confirmation (mine took several minutes) the cashier press payment received and I suppose it checks one blockchain explorer for one confirmation or pending transaction that matches the amount. If it matches it says payment received and receipt is printed.
I noticed each time you press continuar a new QR code gets generated, so new or different address.
I used Trust Wallet and the fee was 1.36 USD.
Receipt is shown in Bolivares, but that is common here even if you pay with USD, Euros or any currency the invoice will be printed in Bolivares.
Experience was good overall, but in this case I paid a little more, something to improve.
You have to remember that here the economy is destroyed:
Monthly inflation can be over 10% easily. Being it under 10% is a success.
Monthly minimum wage is 130 Bs. (less than 5 USD, this purchase was 5x monthly minimum wage), average monthly wage is 120 USD.
Since 2007 14 zeroes were removed from the currency, so this 725 Bs would have been 72,500,000,000,000,000
Thanks for the support to all redditors. Any question let me know!
Here is a blast from the past that occurred exactly 10 years ago, on the 26th of March 2013.
The Cyprus government faced its worst Banking crisis in 2013 as a result of the constant unstability since the infmaous 2008 worldwide crash that triggered shock waves across the globe for many years. The Banking crisis of Cyprus was also a direct influence by the Greek debt crisis, which had led to significant losses for many Cypriot banks.
To help shore up the country's banking system, the European Union and International Monetary Fund agreed to a bailout package for Cyprus, although, one of the conditions of the bailout was that Cyprus would need to contribute a significant portion of the funds itself, through a "bail-in" program.
Under this program, the government would seize a portion of bank deposits over 100,000 euros in order to help finance the bailout.
This announcement of course caused widespread panic among the Cyprus population, who were worried about losing their savings. There were long lines at ATMs as people tried to withdraw their money, and many businesses and individuals began transferring their funds out of Cyprus and into other countries.
More interestingly, at the same time there was a huge demand for Bitcoin in Cyprus together with other countries that were afraid of the same scenario. Many people wanted to protect their savings from a potential government seizure and allocate it somewhere where the government won't have the control. Back then, Bitcoin and its decentralization seemed like the perfect solution for many and was seen as a effective was to hold on the wealth without the risk of government intervention.
The effects of this were huge for Bitcoin. Within a couple of days, the price of Bitcoin surged x3 rising from $30 up to $90 and also triggering the famous bullrun of 2013 where Bitcoin reached and ended its year at a $754.01 price tag.
https://i.redd.it/c4h8nzt2j1qa1.pngIt's very interesting that this happened on this exact time and date 10 years ago, as we are witnessing a similar crisis that goes way beyond in scale in scope compared to Cyprus. With the recent crashes of regional banks in the US and the downfall of Credit Suisse and potentially Deutsche Bank.
The power of decentralized finance and Bitcoin was discovered way before it hit "real" mainstream as we have it today and that the crash of the Banks is actually the most bullish case for Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies in the DeFi space.
Wanted to share this interesting story that basically triggered the surge and bullrun of Bitcoin in 2013. Now, 10 years later, we might see a similar case, just with a much larger scale and impact.
After years of looking for his lost computer that he believed was filled with 7,500 bitcoins the man has found it.
the entire thing cost him around 2.5 million after paying for excavators, labor and city permits to dig up the landfill. He was relieved after finding the computer last month and had a professional data recovery company working on it for the last four weeks trying to recover his lost wallet, this cost alone was $400k.
Unfortunately it turns out the wallet was actually filled with bitcoin cash a hard fork of bitcoin worth a fraction of the price of actual bitcoin.
7,500 x $124 + $930k
so he is now about 1.6 million in debt to cover the cost of the loan he took out using the believed bitcoin as collateral.
you can see the look of defeat in his face.
Truly one of the highlights of just not this week but probably of the whole Crypto history (at least according to me) was this week when Bitcoin started to pump like 30% in three day while the whole banking sector was imploding and there was fear all around.
This just showed that Bitcoin can indeed work as Satoshi Nakamoto wanted it to, a trust-less alternative against banks. We can also strengthen this view as we look on some on-chain data and especially focus on the very people affected by the bank implosions, the retail like us all.
This graph shows how shrimps (0.1BTC to 1BTC) or also known as Retail, were accumulating exactly during the time were banks were imploding at the highest single-day pace since the FTX collapse in November were BTC price was at about $15k-$17k.
Showing how the people that were the most affected by the fear around banks were actually taking Crypto as an alternative, obviously not all of them but we can expect that to be a considerable part of them. Love to see Bitcoin doing what it was intended to, not an inflation-hedge, not a recession hedge but a bank-hedge.