Nobody has petro except the Venezuelan government:
http://explorer.nemchina.com/#/s_account?account=NCGBBZKOTERO3EXMPPCNDNDXZQQJXBEMWWO7MB66

In other news, you can see Abrahan Landaeta Parra's very poor knowledge of Venezuelan pop culture https://youtu.be/xIJAUgYP8dE. Spoiler alert: he knows about cryptocurrency even less 

The owners of Traki are linked to the Venezuelan government. In 2016, Traki was the only store that offered products like diapers at international price. Back then, people couldn't find them anywhere else because the government shut down any other store that tried to sell them above their approved, fixed price. They allowed Traki a monopoly over diapers and graciously looked the other way.

Traki is now taking dollars and euros as payment:
http://cronica.uno/en-tiendas-traki-aceptan-dolares-y-euros-en-efectivo-como-forma-de-pago/

But it's not taking petros yet, as the ICO hasn't happened:
https://twitter.com/maryorinmendez/status/976848847057104896

A barrel of Venezuelan extra-heavy oil isn't worth $60 even if it's already loaded on a ship. I recommend this article to understand why the oil backing is false: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZYnqn75y-eIJ:https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2018/02/27/petro-truly-backed-oil-reserves/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

The number of different tokens in control of the Venezuelan government is baffling. Why use four different tokens? I can't think of any other reason than to confuse and deceive.

By the way, the "petro presale transfer" token has mutable supply, which means the government is technically capable of printing it as fast and recklessly as they have printed the hyperinflationary bolívar.

Official sources: http://chain.nem.ninja/#/mosaic/a67bed551238d970be7cdd8305fbcfbdb8dd8e5224473e18281220b234006eb8/0
https://blog.nem.io/maing-namespaces-and-mosaics/

Do you know how the bolívar is doing now?

https://i.imgur.com/iAqt43j.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/PIJvMVO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/YB5f31u.jpg

The government also claims the ICO has started, but no tokens have moved from the central addresses. This is just another indicator of a scam.
http://explorer.nemchina.com/#/s_account?account=NCGBBZKOTERO3EXMPPCNDNDXZQQJXBEMWWO7MB66

Why hasn't the petro ICO launched yet? It was supposed to launch today at 08:30 VET, and the whitepaper still says it is. A terrible lack of planning. https://web.archive.org/web/20180320165941/http://elpetro.gob.ve/Whitepaper_Petro_es.pdf

happyminer, this takedown of the contract is outstanding. Would you like to help surface it for a more general audience, remaining anonymous if you want? You can also just say you're ok with rehashing the content and we'll write it up, crediting you on this thread. Please DM me.

Give me a break.

Disappeared? Yes – https://armando.info/Reportajes/DemoPublico/2396
Raped? Yes – https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2016/11/30/afiuni-trial/
Tortured? Yes – https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2017/09/15/torture-in-venezuela/
Jailed? Yes – https://elcooperante.com/preso-por-tuitear-dan-zambrano-el-periodista-que-peco-al-retuitear-criticas-contra-el-gobierno/
Police state? Yes, especially against cryptocurrency miners – https://hackernoon.com/extortion-police-raids-and-secrecy-inside-the-venezuelan-bitcoin-mining-world-6e97a25e7402

Get out of your propaganda bubble. If you fund the petro, you will fund all of this.

Getting back on-topic, here's a graph of how much money the Venezuelan government has printed over the years.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tazuoa50olknl1s/money.jpeg?dl=0

Do remember that the government's only promise is to accept petro at the value of a barrel of oil's worth of bolívares (VEF), a currency that's experiencing hyperinflation thanks to... money printing! Oh, and at which rate? They set the rate themselves. The whitepaper says they'll use a formula with a discount rate of at least 10%, and no upper bound.

Not all dictatorships are the same, but if you think Venezuela is so fine and democratic, you should take a trip there. Talk to brown people if you want, run an informal poll and see how much people like Maduro.

We're speaking English in a site hosted in the US that spawned out of an invention that came from a man who published his research in English and found an American audience. You're using a computer that wouldn't exist without key US inventions. Wake up, dude, you are *also* living in a surrogate of US culture. You obviously also have enough disposable time and income to sit around and shill the petro on a forum, so you're doing quite well yourself, better than at least 87% of Venezuelans.


And I hope it won't, because I know my country and my people would suffer more if the petro raised capital for Maduro's regime. But you also are welcome to waste your money on a technically incompetent team that can't even send email properly.

Actually, I registered on this forum before you did. And I could accuse you of being a KGB agent that registered recently to shill the petro. I could tell you I despise the far right too, and that you're making oversimplifications and straw-manning me. But where would that take us? Off-topic.

Yes, I am Venezuelan and proud of it. And I'm shedding light on the petro because when Maduro is exposed to everyone as the scammer he is, perhaps a less corrupt government will come along the and the people will be better off.

You guys may not care about the links I sent you proving insanely high corruption (Venezuela Swiss Leaks) or widespread poverty and hunger (ENCOVI), but they show the truth. We Venezuelans are tired of this: in the last free-ish elections that were held, the opposition got 2/3rd of Parliament, which means the majority of the population agrees with me.

Of course, if you want to spend your life savings on petro, I can't stop you. Tareck will be very happy about that extra yacht he'll be able to buy with all the naive people like yourself, and you'll never get your money back.

Saying "I don't like" the government is an understatement. The government tore my family apart by making us all emigrate. The government has made people I care about go hungry, some of them I'm afraid to research if they're still alive.

You have an outsider perspective on Venezuela, and Russia Today/Venezuela State Propaganda is very, incredibly removed from the truth. I work with a team of independent journalists, with real Venezuelans who are actually living there and chronicle what happens.

The petro isn't just a project I don't like, it is a project that will continue to fund government corruption. I notice you didn't say anything about the Swiss Leaks, if the Venezuelan government is as virtuous as you claim, that leak wouldn't exist. And there's many, many more billions that are unaccounted for. This is what the petro will fund. If, after they steal the money, there's anything at all left for the good people of Venezuela, they'll throw us a bone or two.

When you say "a lot", exactly how many do you mean?

Are you including the 87% of Venezuelans who currently live in poverty?
Are you including the 62% of Venezuelans who don't have enough to eat?

You think *these* people have the disposable income to buy dollars?
https://www.ucab.edu.ve/investigacion/centros-e-institutos-de-investigacion/encovi-2017/

Of course not. The petro is a way for the government to fund itself, and potentially funnel more billions into their Swiss offshore accounts: https://projects.icij.org/swiss-leaks/countries/ven

Very little of it will end up in Venezuelans' pockets.

I can assure you, my friend, that I'm not paid by Washington nor do I have any ties, direct or indirect, to the US Government. I'm a decent person that opposes the government, I am a Venezuelan who has lived there for 24 years, and I hope we can discuss rationally. You can find me on Twitter by the same handle. Podemos hablar en español.

The technical aspects and the implementation were disastrous. Bad SSL certificates, huge load times, it takes forever to get an email, very weak AML provisions, an ideological and technically weak whitepaper, the problems are endless. Technicians who are this bad have no business making a cryptocurrency.

I would love it if the Venezuelan government came up with a true, decentralized, well-executed cryptocurrency that worked for the people. But this is not it. This is just a scam to stay in power, and I mean that as a person who has watched them act for many, many years.

False, the public won't adopt petro because the public can't BUY petro using VEF.

False. PDVSA cannot force its creditors or suppliers to accept petro. They will simply go elsewhere. Our extra-heavy oil isn't that attractive to most investors, and PDVSA is in no position to demand special payment conditions.

False again. A Venezuelan barrel of oil isn't worth $60, even when loaded on a tanker. Even with the ICO discount, and even if they were actually giving you oil, this would be a bad deal. Again: the government won't give you oil, they will give you VEF.

This claim is quite hilarious coming from the government responsible for the only hyperinflation currently in the world. Why don't they make VEF "anti-inflation" then? Why didn't they think of that?

Hi. Venezuelan here. I WISH that's how it ended! Venezuelans aren't allowed to buy petros, because the initial sale is only in USD/EUR/BTC/ETH, and most Venezuelans only have VEF (our worthless, hyperinflated currency). Maduro knows this, there's no way he would allow Venezuelans to buy PTR and then dump it for BTC.

If anybody was off-topic it was the OP, I was just replying to a comment and said I'd get back to the discussion.

In any case, Venezuelan Law is very much relevant for an investor that wants to put money on the petro. Maduro's regime claims the petro is legal when lawyerly consensus says it is not. He also claims that it's backed by oil when it's not (read the Prodavinci article I linked upthread – Prodavinci is one of the few Venezuelan news outlets the government doesn't control). It's backed by a VEF-denominated barrel of oil, and the government has hyperinflated the price of the bolívar. They're printing tons more as we speak.

All of these things are relevant to analyze whether the petro is an awful investment.

The discussion is getting off-topic, but I'll say this:

Artículo 347. El pueblo de Venezuela es el depositario del poder constituyente originario. En ejercicio de dicho poder, puede convocar una Asamblea Nacional Constituyente con el objeto de transformar al Estado, crear un nuevo ordenamiento jurídico y redactar una nueva Constitución.

"The people of Venezuela may invoke a Constituent Assembly".

Artículo 348. La iniciativa de convocatoria a la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente podrá hacerla el Presidente...

"The initiative to convoke a Constituent Assembly may be enforced by the President..."

Seriously, try to find any Venezuelan lawyer with experience in Constitutional law. All of them will agree that this "initiative to convoke" means that it has to be approved by the people first (like Article 347 says). If Maduro is so fond of democracy, why didn't he ask the people if they wanted a Constituent Assembly? There was no way to vote against the Constituent Assembly.

In short, the petro is illegal, by international consensus, which is all that matters when you're trying to raise money. Venezuela's own sovereign Parliament and 12 countries in the Americas have refused to recognize the authority of a supra-constitutional body that sits on top of democratic institutions.

You will not find a single Venezuelan lawyer expert in Constitutional Law that thinks the National Constituent Assembly is legal. It was invoked by Maduro without a Yes/No referendum, which is required by law (http://www.minci.gob.ve/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/CONSTITUCION.pdf), and the company responsible for the technology behind our elections for over 10 years said the results were tampered with: http://www.smartmatic.com/news/article/smartmatic-statement-on-the-recent-constituent-assembly-election-in-venezuela/

It's quite simple. The petro is new issuance of debt, Venezuela's constitution explicitly requires new debt to be approved by Parliament (not by Constituent Assemblies), hence the petro is illegal.

Really? Show me the statements made by those companies. Just because the government buys a lot of Chinese Antminers L3 doesn't make them partners.