As to "freedom to choose my research topics":
How can you justify to yourself to take money from the people at gunpoint to research bitcoin for hundreds of hours? How about researching wasteful spending by tenured professors?
Hint: I am a professor of
computer science. Guess where the idea of bitcoin came out of?
And methinks that if I could prevent a few folks here losing their life savings to scammers, Brazilian or otherwise, that may already justify my salary. Which may be more than I deserve, but is not exactly taken at gunpoint from them,
With Brazil's cpi at over 6% and food prices over 20% annual inflation because your government can't rob enough people fast enough, they have to print money to cover your salary. Maybe you should study how you can prevent ALL of your country's population to lose 6% of their wealth each year instead of a few people getting scammed.
NOT easy for an academic to criticize the ways of his own govt. And to be fair, the problem with fiat is with most of the govts around the world and is NOT particular to Brazil. Actually, a lot of countries in south america have been really screwed over the past 30 years by the IMF and forced into various kinds of cutting of social programs and specialization to serve the needs of the USA... however, several of the countries have stood up to those specialization pressures... and said screw paying back the loans through the IMF (I think Argentina is one of them) and have created more diversified and self-sustaining economies, which the USA considers a form of hostility. Whatever the situation, there are a lot more injustices occurring through various forms of fiat manipulation rather than through bitcoin.
Nobody forced them to take out the loans in the first place. They screwed themselves over. "Those asshole lenders, they actually expect me to pay them back." Gimme a break. These third world countries were begging for loans and agreed to conditions. Then they balked at honoring the conditions after they already agreed to them. The they begged to renegotiate the terms, got the new terms and balked at them too!
I agree that the IMF crowd are glorified loan sharks, but if you borrow from loan sharks you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
EDIT: and
if you think Argentina's economy is self-sustaining, then you are delusional. It's a basket case. I don't really want to get into a long debate, but in essence we could probably agree that there are a lot of complications with various actors in the region and even though I have studied some of this (many years ago), I know enough to realize that there are patterns of pressure from the USA intervention and some countries have been better than others in dealing with these matters.
Regarding your last point about Argentina, I do NOT claim to be any kind of effort - but I was making the assertion that when they refused to pay their IMF loan, that caused a lot of additional pressures on them. But NONE of the countries really want to be export countries and only produce some low paid product and then to be dependent upon the USA to dictate their situation(s). Whether they are successful or NOT may be another story with additional intricacies, if we were to delve into the specifics, and I am sure there are on the ground people who are much more qualified than either of us to give us some of these facts.
We probably agree that in the end, bitcoin can have a variety of liberating aspects for the people of many of these countries in south america