Communism tends to create these patterns. It was the same in pre-1989 Poland. Owning USD was illegal, you were supposed to turn them to authorities and get "Pol

Communism tends to create these patterns. It was the same in pre-1989 Poland. Owning USD was illegal, you were supposed to turn them to authorities and get "Polish issued USD" instead. It was a separate kind of currency different from the regular (worthless) Polish currency. But the official exchange rate was order of magnitude worse than the real USD-Polish złoty exchange rate, so nobody did that if they could avoid it. There were special shops "Pewex" that had all the foreign goods and the best Polish export products - you could only buy that stuff there for Polish USD. It was a way for the state to extract hard currencies from the population. There was a whole class of people that exchanged USD to Polish currency on the black market (with the real exchange rate). They were called cink-ciarz because they stood in touristy places and whispered "ex-change" in broken English to tourists. It sounded like cink-ciarz to Poles. Lots of fortunes were made that way, and people were in prison because of that.