Since I look into trading on crypto-currencies, I use to invest sometime reading news about them, trying to understand the real use, the real applications that are solving real problems with these virtual coins.

The predominant comment you find when you talk to anybody is:

Bitcoin is very unpredictable and the value fluctuates a lot, it’s too risky.

So well, you read and read, and then you find so many users from countries as Venezuela and Argentina, that moved their money into some of the crypto-currencies. For them this is not a risk, is an opportunity to save their savings.

Why?

The graph below shows the BTC/USD (blue line) in comparison with BTC/USD.

You can clearly can see how unstable is Bolivar in comparison to BTC, both compared with the USD.

I live in a country that is stable, economically, politically and socially. But there are other people that are not as fortunate as me. And for them, doing the simple math demonstrate that crypto currency is more stable than their own local currency.

Why they do not change to dollars?

In so many countries for the tourists they offer hotels, adventure activities, flights… with a different price every single day. The business person, the first thing they do in the morning is to consult the USD value in comparison to the local currency and then s/he defines the prices for the day.

You can pay with local currency or in dollars, but they ensure some grade of parity.

It works like this and the fact is that the continuous flow of foreign currencies and many other things that work makes the things stable. I have seen this in different countries as Thailand, Costa Rica or Vietnam.

My point is that in countries that are not as stable as the ones mentioned above, the lack of foreign currency makes the companies and the people to run behind the USD, making the supply/demand balance very unbalanced.

So, for some of these people who are able to trade to crypto-currencies, they do it, it’s not risky, it’s an opportunity.

Venezuela

In Venezuela there are so many initiatives that are evolving to escape of the inflation situation. I found these two the most interesting ones:

https://www.bitcoinvenezuela.com/ is a place where you can learn from scratch how crypto currencies work.

Banano, this is a crypto currency that comes from Nano project and tries to offer instant micro-transactions at low cost. Banano distributes the coin freely and easily using a couple of different mediums. There are individual initiatives where people is trying to use as coin to obtain food in Venezuela.

• Here a video explaining how they do it.
• Here an entry in Reddit asking about support.

Banano at this moment is still in distribution mode