This article is all written on the decision from Wells Fargo to stop offering zelle to accounts with a Venezuelan mailing adress.<p>The decision from wells fargo seems reasonable, most of the Venezuelans (including me) were using zelle for commercial exchanges or forex exchange, and that is clearly agains the TOS for general uses.<p>I personally know business owners getting more than 20k daily in their personal zelle accounts, it was obvious that a shutdown was coming to it.<p>As you might understand, there is almost 500k legal venezuelans in the US [1] and another 400k [2] illegals, that’s almost 1million Venezuelans in the US, our country population right now is about 23millions (more than 5 millions have flee the country), so, pretty much everyone have family or friends in the US with zelle accounts and that is why zelle is so widely use it in here, but it starts a problem for US banks when people with business that are not related at all to US start using zelle (us based) to collect payments (of venezuelan business), this payments are all done in personal accounts and never declare taxes or anything, so… that’s a huge problem for banks<p>For all of you wondering if people in Venezuela uses bitcoin, NO WE DON’T USE BITCOIN AT ALL, there are only 2 uses for bitcoin in Venezuela, 1st use is as a currency exchange medium (USD to VES), hugely backed by drugs money + laundering… 2nd is to write nice articles about how bitcoin is changing venezuela for international media to consume<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Americans" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Americans</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/venezuelan-immigrants-united-states" rel="nofollow">https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/venezuelan-immigrant...</a>
Sounds similar to how Romanians will often denominate rent payment and larger settlements in Euros rather than in Leis (RON). In essence, they're doing it for the same reason; because of the volatility of their own currency. The exception seems to be that this is legal in Romania. I'm not sure the same is true for Venezuela, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Seems very short sighted of the US government to allow this to just get shut down instead of encouraging it and legitimizing it as much as possible. Seems to me that Venezuelan citizens adopting the dollar would be in the interests of the US government.
Curiously this article doesn't mention Reserve, a stablecoin that is specifically targeting Venezuela. <a href="https://reserve.org/" rel="nofollow">https://reserve.org/</a>
Huh, so the same politicians concerned with propping up the bank Cartel also would love to see more dollarization. Guess that will put them in a catch-22.
wow a coindesk article gaining traction on hackernews! that's a nice trojan horse towards favorable digital asset sentiment, which usually isn't present here