Quote from: cr1776 on September 02, 2019, 10:12:35 AM

One wonders why more Argentines don't take money off shore or use bitcoin, because although the politicians keep saying "this time is different", it really isn't.

Any Argentinian who has half a brain and considerable savings has done that already. You wouldn't believe how well they can play the system, decades of disastrous governments have kind of made them this way.

Back in 2014 I spent most of the year in Buenos Aires and at that time there was an "official" exchange rate for the Peso and a real one (that was between 50% and 100% above the official rate). You could buy Pesos at the official rate, but not foreign currency, so people had to resort to the black market to get dollars or euros. The center of the city was full of small clandestine offices exchanging currency, along with many dodgy-looking street exchangers. In all these places you could always find a queue of people waiting to get rid of their Pesos before the next devaluation.

The most creative ones would find ways to buy USD at better rates with different methods, for example using their credit cards in casinos in Uruguay to buy chips (at official exchange rate) and then cashing them out into USD.

As bank transfers to other countries were also blocked, there were offices that did so-called "giros". You could take your currency (local or foreign), give it to a person and they would make sure that it would appear in a bank account anywhere in the world, for a small fee.

The most tech-savvy people however already knew about BTC and took good advantage of it. There was a company called Satishitango (it still exists and actually it got really big and legal now) that would purchase your BTC at Bitstamp-2% and blue (good) exchange rate and send a guy on a moped to your flat with the cash in hand. It literally solved my problems to transfer money into the country as my first and last attempt of sending a wire got my money lost forever.

Back in those days there was already a quite big Bitcoin club in Argentina, and some good startups emerged from that scene such as Ripio, Flixxo or RSK. Mauricio Macri spoke out as a big supporter of Bitcoin, not sure though if it will still fit well with his latest plans.

Today I know that there are still plenty of offices that use BTC to send money in and out of the country, and I bet they will multiply like mushrooms in the short future.