Could Bitcoin become national reserve asset in Venezuela?
As protests in Venezuela (often met with brutal force by the authorities) continue over the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro and his policies, opposition leader María Corina Machado has envisioned Bitcoin (BTC) as a national reserve asset in a future democratic Venezuela. Specifically, Machado was discussing what she called the “violations of financial rights” by Maduro and the former president Hugo Chávez, “a tragedy unfolding over the last two decades,” with Alex Gladstein, the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), in an interview streamed on September 5. Economy in Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro According to her, the “Venezuelan Bolivar, once stable at three to four units per U.S. dollar, has lost 14 zeros under Chávez and Maduro, turning a functional economy into a catastrophic financial crisis, (…) inflation reached an unimaginable 1.7 million percent, with prices doubling every four days” in 2018.” ...