65 BTC were traded last week in Venezuela only using LocalBitcoin (up from 60), these 65 BTC were 7,685,000,000,000 Bs. (Bolivares, national currency ISO VES). One BTC is around 135,000,000,000 Bs. Minimum monthly wage is 1,800,000 Bs. (less than a USD).
Hi guys, hope you are doing fine!
Jus updating this week numbers.
As I always mention:
– These numbers are only using LocalBitcoin that has a public API where you can see the numbers.
– There has been a decrease in the amount of Bitcoin traded, years ago it was more than 2,000 BTC weekly. Reasons could be:
– People is migrating to other services, specially Binance that since months ago lets you exchange P2P Bolivares with some cryptos (BTC, ETH, DAI, USDT and BUSD) and there you can chance ANY crypto into BNB with no fee, so in theory you can go from DOGE to Bolivares for example. These fees are lower than LocalBitcoin.
– With the price increase of the BTC, 65 BTC are around 4,000,000 USD even when a lot more BTC were traded, if you coverted them into Bolivares the amount was around 5-6 million USD, so the drop in BTC has been crazy but in USD not that crazy.
Minium monthly wage is in fact less than 1 USD, but average monthly wage (in my research) is around 60-80 USD. Yet there is people that only "earn" that officially. Wages in the public sector are based in that wage, so a "high" rank could earn maybe 20 times minimum wage, that is like 20 USD.
Professors at public university for example. Even with PHD there is no way they can have a wage over 20 USD.
According to some NGO (CENDA is the name) a 5 members family needs around 300-350 USD monthly to "live", so do your math.
That people survive with relatives abroad that send remittances (that is where LocalBitcoin and Binance are important), they do something else to get extra income and so on. Other important exchanges are AirTM and even Uphold which works here. There are a few national exchanges with a high KYC (I think only Venezuelan are allowed) like Cryptia and AmberesCoin.
People that use the exchanges is people abroad sending remittances to Venezuela, store owners with a lot of Bolivares and have to get rid of them as soon as possible, miners and even the own goverment to circunvent sanctions.
If you don't have anyone can help you or you don't have anything to do, you probably left the country (even walking) or you died (sad but true). You cannot survive with 1 USD monthly.
Like a month ago there were new banknotes released (200,000 – 500,000 and 1,000,000 bolivares), banks have three (3) weeks closed and I haven't seen one of these bills yet. Here things work different as cash is amost not used. 1,000,000 Bs. (highest) bill is less than 0.5 USD. Years ago with the help of a friend in USA (he had some Venezuelan bills there) I was able of shipping some Venezuelan bills to some redditors like Lord_Saren
Two weeks ago I posted I got COVID, got a lot of support from all reddit. I'm fine, as I said it really got me mild, still I haven't recovered the smell and taste. Even being mild a I spent a lot of money! I think problem here is even if get mild people don't have money to buy even acetaminofen (Tylenol).
Sources (PLEASE check them!!!):
https://www.usefultulips.org/combined_VES_Page.html
https://www.caracaschronicles.com/
https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC
https://localbitcoins.com/buy-bitcoins-online/ves/
UPDATE: Drew Brinsky just posted a video about this when he came
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