Bitcoin World #4 - Venezuela: Bitcoin Won't Fix Venezuela with Javier Bastardo - WBD194
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2020
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Location: Caracas, Venezuela Date: Thursday, 13th February Project: Cointelegraph Role: Journalist
Venezuela is many years into a political and economic crisis. Rooted in the Hugo Chavez presidency and continued by Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela is a mafia dictatorship wearing the cloak of socialism.
Years of economic mismanagement and corruption has led to financial disaster in Venezuelan, comparatively worse than the Great Depression, Zimbabwe's 2008–2009 hyperinflation crisis and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Hyperinflation led to significant growth in poverty, starvation and mass migration, with millions leaving the country. With the collapse of the currency, many Bitcoiners, including myself, asked whether Bitcoin could help. Could Bitcoin reduce the impact of hyperinflation? Could locals mine Bitcoin at low energy costs to earn an income? I visited Venezuela to find out.
In this interview, I talk to Javier Bastardo, a journalist for Cointelegraph, based in Caracas, Venezuela. We discuss Venezuela's political and economic situation, hyperinflation and the reality of Bitcoin adoption in the country.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the What Bit Bitcoin Did Podcast. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to the What Bitcoin Did Podcast, which is brought you by The Mighty Cracken. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm your host Peter McCormack and right now I'm at the airport I'm about to fly to |
| 0:14.6 | El Salvador having just flown in from Caracas it's 3.30 a.m. I'm pretty |
| 0:19.6 | tired but I want to get the show out the show with hafei a Bastardo out for you |
| 0:24.1 | But just a few notes up front it might be a bit noisy in the background. I'm in the airport |
| 0:28.0 | I'm recording this intro and outro on my iPhone |
| 0:32.1 | We couldn't take our equipment into Venezuela. As a Maduro regime |
| 0:35.5 | doesn't like journalists, you know, we knew that if we were taking the equipment |
| 0:39.5 | we would have been interrogated. They've also got a habit of arresting journalists or and |
| 0:45.2 | even recently they arrested and put in jail an influencer just for a tweet. So we |
| 0:50.0 | only took our iPhones and our camera each and pretended we were just travel bloggers and |
| 0:55.4 | we did also actually get pulled over by the police and threatened with the rest if we were |
| 0:58.7 | making any anti-government content or our local fixer managed to get us out of that which was a really |
| 1:04.0 | weird situation as you know we're pulled over by I think it was five police officers |
| 1:08.3 | on the main highway anyway as such I had some pretty basic equipment to record this interview, so the sound isn't the best. |
| 1:15.0 | And also, please bear with Havier. His English is pretty good, but he has a strong accent. |
| 1:20.0 | But because I wanted someone on the scene there, I want to get the truth of what was happening and |
| 1:23.6 | Having spoken to heavier over the last few months and knowing that he works a coin |
| 1:27.6 | Telegraph as a journalist he's pretty plugged into the scene and I wanted him to clear up the myths around Bitcoin and any other nonsense with shit coins like Dash. |
| 1:35.0 | So sorry for the long intro, but I just wanted to set this up, but I've got no idea how this will sound when it comes out. |
| 1:41.0 | I should give a shout out to my sponsors before we get into the show. |
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