Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

&gt; In tragic irony, unskilled workers were often far better off financially than highly-educated ones, and many of the latter dropped out of their careers to clean tables or pick people up from the airport to get access to the CUC economy. The dual currency system institutionalized inequality, creating clear classes of haves and have nots. For many people like Lucia, this as much as anything else showed that the revolution was a sham.<p>The second part of this paragraph feels like a really weird framing of the first part. As far as I can tell:<p>- workers in what the author considers less-skilled jobs are making more than those in higher skilled jobs<p>- some workers are quitting to take up these &quot;unskilled&quot; jobs, and it appears they&#x27;re fully able to do so<p>On the one hand, it seems the incentives aren&#x27;t great for people to work in certain professions. On the other, it&#x27;s kind of hard to argue that there&#x27;s a fundamental class struggle going on here when a doctor can join the &quot;privileged&quot; class by simply quitting their job and wiping tables. Clearly there&#x27;s more going on here than somebody is letting on. It would make more sense for people affiliated with the government to have a privileged position (perhaps by being able to access foreign currency more directly).

Headline is hyperbolic as the article itself states crypto usage in Cuba is on par with other countries, about 2.5%. There may be some variance in use cases and good future potential in Cuba but it&#x27;s certainly not yet an active &quot;revolution&quot;. There are certainly good use cases (and existing solutions) across the world for alternative banking systems, especially for international remittances.<p>The problem with positing Bitcoin as the solution is something that this article highlights as the problem with the Cuba&#x27;s currencies - both Bitcoin and Cuba fiat are incredibly unstable. People living on tight margins in poor economies cannot afford to gamble with their daily cashflow. Every currency fluctuation has a direct effect on their daily living standards, including what they will be able to afford to eat. In the past few months we&#x27;ve seen massive drops in the value of Bitcoin, such as 25% over 10 days and 40% over 14 days. These are the kind of currency devaluations that poor people on very low incomes cannot afford.<p>The article would have been better if it had talked about cryptocurrency in general, not specifically the one used for financial speculation by millionaires (speculation in which Bitcoin Magazine plays a part in and it&#x27;s founders &amp; CEO financially benefit from).<p>Centralized financial networks and stable coins (if we insist on using a blockchain) are more likely to be the answer for these use cases any maybe the hype around Bitcoin helps that but as-is, it&#x27;s not a good solution for those who would actually benefit from alternative financial networks.

I think removing embargos would help more than a volatile cryptocurrency.

Went diving for the lede and gave up somewhere near the wreck of the titanic. Maybe I scrolled right past but wow that was a lot of extra context.

&gt; The official Cuban annual median salary in 2018 was approximately 9,300 pesos, or around $372.<p>To put this into perspective, a single bitcoin transaction currently costs $2.3.

The woman mentioned in the article mentions she first heard about bitcoin watching keiser report on RT. Out of curiosity, I did a youtube search for keiser report, and sorted by most views, and the top results are all spanish dubbed episodes about bitcoin. So it looks like Max Keiser has a major audience in spanish speaking countries, even though his show is really for western audiences.

Bitcoin could be the undoing of the regime. It will allow Cubans to accumulate wealth that the regime cannot seize or convert into another worthless Cuban domestic currency. While I like the idea of free health care and education, the idea that a brain surgeon gets paid same as a street cleaner is absurd. Cuba is a series of failed experiments.

I remember reading stories about the great cuban sneakernet where people got all kinds of tv shows, etc, with quite low latency, all without internet access through USB sticks. I wonder if there is a way to run something similar to a cryptocurrency on such a &quot;network&quot;.

Some of the worst bullshit I&#x27;ve read on Cuba in recent months. And there&#x27;s been a lot of that to choose from

This shows one of the few uses of Bitcoin: evading the law (in this case the US-embargo)

&gt; the communist government toyed with capitalism “the way a tiger plays with its prey: tapping it lightly one minute, squeezing the life out of it the next. Socialist officials urged would-be Cuban capitalists to go ahead and open their small businesses, then they erected layers of burdensome regulations to limit profit and handicap success. Their real goal was not to lift millions out of poverty. It was to prevent anyone from making millions.”<p>It&#x27;s the same thing now happening in China. Unfortunately, this mentality and ideology now also finds its home in North America.

Abandoned a paragraph in due to an Unllunavoidable ad covering half the screen

The Maleconazo riots were less than 1000 people. Hardly earth-shattering in a country of 11 million. But unsurprisingly the US touts it as some kind of populist uprising when this sort of thing has been happening in Portland for 18 months.

Bitcoin doesn’t scale as they will soon find out!<p>$10 fee on every transaction and an immutable 7tps. LN is joke.

There&#x27;s everything in there: being your own bank, trust and distancing from pyramid schemes, hodling, ...<p>How often does Bitcoin need to fail as a currency so that crypto-currency enthusiasts stop pushing the narrative of Bitcoin being a currency?<p>But maybe if Cuba becomes anarcho-capitalistic, the stupid embargo gets finally lifted &#x2F;s.

Ahh yes. socialism bad, unfettered capitalism good.<p>Maybe we (The US) should just lift the embargo?