By Luis Manuel Aguana
I open 2020 with the confession of a typo: I
confess that I was wrong about the headline, almost 2 years ago, a note related
to the launch of the Petro in the following way: The Petro: Sovereign Cryptocurrency died at birth (see note in http://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/the-petro-sovereign-cryptocurrency-died.html). In my defense, when I explain why something that was not really dead
but rather in a party, as we usually say in Venezuela, is still alive, kicking
and stronger than ever, I can argue that each of the arguments described in
that note to reach that conclusion of the alleged death of Petro as a financial
mechanism for international exchange were rigorously true. But as the police
say when they drag you into a cage anyway: you are right but you are in jail!
In fact, with the assumptions that the regime
made and gave to us Venezuelans, when it announced the birth of Petro that
experiment would not have gone far. The regime initially came up with this
mechanism to evade the sanctions imposed by the international community, trying
to impose an international mechanism of oil payments that at that time was
unfeasible to accept for any international economic factor. But like any virus,
the Petro's approach mutated. It changed its scenario and objectives. They
realized that it was impossible to try to eat the whale in one bite and they
rethought it.
And that's where my mistake lay, thinking it
would stay there. I focused my analysis on a photograph, in other words, as the
economists say, "ceteris paribus", if the variables remained the
same, that invention would not have had results. My mistake was in not focusing
my analysis on the film that was starting to be shot. Two years later we have
cancer within the country in full operational capacity. And to have achieved
that, my dear friends, the regime required time to put it together and develop
it, and like any cancer it grew. And the official opposition has given it all
the time in the world to do so, and it plans to give it even more this new year
with the election season. As the doctors say, "cancer is curable if
diagnosed in time". And of course it's only curable if it's treated in
time.
The Petro experiment, now national, is more
ambitious than people think. The regime has placed three fundamental objectives
in this project: a) the destruction of the national payment system and of the
bolivar as a currency; b) the neutralization of the hyperinflation that is
undermining the bases of its sustainability; and c) the transformation of the
country into a gigantic laboratory to test something that has never been done
in the world: that a sovereign cryptomoney be the main currency of exchange.
The latter would create an economic distortion of unforeseeable consequences,
which would begin by making Venezuela official as a gigantic dirty money
launderer, completely outside the traditional control systems of international
banking.
Since
the original proposal to make the cryptocurrency internationally accepted was
not feasible, the regime made a major change to its internal use: "After a pre-sale tour that, according
to information published by local and international media, was not as
successful as expected, the
Venezuelan State began to announce a series of measures with which it sought to
legitimize and promote the use of Petro within the country: In the
first instance, it made the digital currency official as a means of official
payment and equated minimum wages with their associated value, and then
demanded it as currency for services provided by public agencies, a trend that
has been joined by some popularly known shops and businesses.” (see in
Spanish Analysis
of the Petro, the crypt currency to which very few have had Access https://www.diariobitcoin.com/index.php/2018/11/22/analisis-sobre-el-petro-en-venezuela-la-criptomoneda-a-la-que-muy-pocos-han-tenido-acceso/).
From a strictly
technical point of view, the Petro, unlike the rest of the crypt coins, is not
generated by mining. The regime has complete control over its generation. No
one "mines Petros" like the miners of the rest of the cryptosystems
do. And of course the regime - no one else - has control over who spends them
and how they are spent. Since its start in early 2018, when they used platforms
with algorithms based on existing blockchain chains (Ethereum, NEM), the regime
has mutated into generating its own technological architectures: "It
started using them with the Venezuelan State's Plataforma Patria in November
2018, but it was only recently (July 2019) that the APIs and exchange
mechanisms that allow an ecosystem of services traded in petros became
known" (see in Spanish The Petro and the new monetary architecture in
Venezuela http://www.portalalba.org/index.php/areas/economia/finanzas/22244-el-petro-y-la-nueva-arquitectura-monetaria-en-venezuela). These APIs (or Application
Programming Interface) are the key to an entire ecosystem of exchange and transformation
of Petros back and forth into other cryptosystems and then into US dollars.
What has the regime done
with all this time as a result of not yet having resolved the "cessation
of usurpation"? Screwing itself up, consolidating an instrument that can
only be developed with time. It has made Venezuelans more and more dependent on
a monumental system of State donations that is not backed by any official
reserve in the Central Bank of Venezuela. But in order to start up this
ecosystem, it was necessary to create a market large enough to function.
And then for that
initial test appeared the Petros nominated bonuses and allowances in purses
created for all public servants, retirees and Social Security pensioners.
Imagine, millions of people able to generate a large enough demand for goods
and services. Businesses emerged within the country in agreement with the
regime by accepting the Petro, while the regime forced the payment of taxes,
fees, and any state service in the cryptocurrency, including passports.
The next natural step is
the transactions between the Petro and other cryptocurrencies. But that's no
good if people don't have Petros. With the December mass distribution of ½
Petro created the market. Little by little the exchanges will begin to move to
the regime authorizing international exchange platforms to trade with Petros
and thus transform Petros into Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies (see in
Spanish Venezuela authorizes 6 exchange platforms to trade in Petroshttps://noticias.bitcoin.com/regulacion/venezuela-autoriza-6-plataformas-de-intercambio-para-comenzar-a-vender-la-criptomoneda-nacional-el-petro/) and from there the
changeover to international currency is immediate. These platforms are outside
the orbit of financial sanctions on the regime.
We do not know how far
this experiment that began in Venezuela in early 2018 will go, and whether they
will succeed in displacing the country's payment system. But one thing I am
completely sure of: Petro started two years ago as a crazy idea, with all the
economic and technology experts -including me- thinking that it would not work
(and in fact it would not have advanced much if the promised trilogy had been
realized on January 23, 2019), and the truth is that now we see that by the end
of 2019 international news channels were reporting lines of thousands of people
waiting to be served in stores authorized by the regime, paying in biometric
equipment, food and other goods in Petros. The technological development of the
systems has been unstoppable. In spite of the crisis, the regime has not spared
any technology to carry out this development that Maduro is seeing as its
economic lifeline.
If the regime deepens in
2020 the use of Petro, as it seems to be announced in one more year of
coexistence between official opposition and the regime, we Venezuelans will
have been the guinea pigs of a new virtual monetary system, unique in the
world, which according to some experts has the unproven promise of zero
inflation, and absence of speculative bubbles (see in Spanish The Crypto
currencies, inflation and debt systems https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@juanfb/las-criptomonedas-la-inflacion-y-los-sistemas-de-deuda).
However, in a communist
system, which by definition destroys the productive base of the private sector,
we believe that this promise is unlikely to be fulfilled, even knowing that
virtually the entire labor base of the country depends in one way or another on
the state. However, the Castro-Chavista-Madurist-Socialist criminals who are in
power will squeeze every last ounce of drugs and gold out of the Mining Arc to
sustain this new system, laundering the profits produced, and introducing them
into that gigantic and sophisticated washing machine that Venezuela will have
become, generating a mirage of economic well-being that will directly affect
any electoral result that the official opposition negotiates with Maduro and
his narco-regime.
Every minute that the regime is in power is another
turn that tightens the screws of the shackles placed on the feet of every
Venezuelan, making the Petro the shackle of the 21st century. The official
opposition and the government in charge of Juan Guaidó had better think about
that. Any solution that is "on the table" cannot wait another minute
and must be applied now...
Caracas, January 2, 2020
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
(currently suspended)
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