5 ms·

I'm not sure it's true. Crypto is very popular in Turkey too and you can easily sell your coins for fiat Turkish lira, withdraw the money to your bank account i

by mrtksn 5y ago

I'm not sure it's true. Crypto is very popular in Turkey too and you can easily sell your coins for fiat Turkish lira, withdraw the money to your bank account in seconds any time of the day and convert it to USD - no questions asked. Then you send that USD anywhere or withdraw it from a branch or an ATM(that supports USD, there are plenty). Also, 45x the economy, 15x the population with significant percentage of it having at least one exchange account. No question asked when bringing money from abroad is the governments policy, strong EU, UK and US financial ties and integrations are in place with billions already laundered. The neighbouring Bulgaria, the police seized 200K Bitcoins and sold them at the previous bull market. I know what you mean but El Salvador is a micro-wormhole. The value essentially comes from the publicity, they had something like 700 BTC last time I checked. El Salvador is a storm in a teacup. One noisy storm though. Their president is a millennial who knows how to ride the hype train.

inter_netuser 5y ago
isn't the difference that the entities in El Salvador are obligated to take it? Questions or not, that's a different story, but Citibank in Turkey is not obligated to accept Bitcoin, but in El Salvador - they are under a legal obligation to accept it. Citibank is active in El Salvador.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Yes, that's the difference. However the volume in El Salvador is so small that it's insignificant in any real terms. It's a poor country with a tiny population. They certainly wont be able to exchange you USD for BTC and vise versa if you try to do it with a significant amount.
  - panarky 5y ago
    Classic Innovator's Dilemma.
m00dy 5y ago
1-) If your transactions have low volume, no one is going to question what you are doing. The problem arises when you have a lot of Bitcoins and couldn't really explain where they come from. El Salvador fixes this. 2-) Sending/Receiving USD is not as free as you think. You can get sanctioned like IRAN. Every foreign USD transfer must be checked through a blacklist. That's how it works.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Actually, no one asks anything. That's why it's really popular money laundering destination. I lost count of scandals of money laundry, fraud and tax evasions that each are over a billion USD. They tend to come out when something political happens. The amount of cocaine seized this year was in the scale of metric tons with no arrests made on the receiving side. Oh and about your 2). I have some exposure to that stuff and I assure you, it's not how it works. The US does have sanctions but these are lists of names and specific corporations, you don't suddenly get into a blacklist. These lists change with the political situations. Also, there are known terrorist, so if you are not one of those or if you are not politically targeted you wont have problems. If you are in a list, you use private jet to move cash or gold. Turkey is truly the wild west of illicit money at the moment. If you send USD, it will go through the usual SWIFT mechanisms and will be visible to the USA but you can always move cash and gold. Turkey's proximity to major markets and the infrastructure is excellent. EU is just right there, accessible by plane, train, car, bus or boat. UK is less than 4 hours of flight, just like Dubai. Istanbul has a physical cash only gold and USD/EUR/GBP trading center. The city of Istanbul is gargantuous, 3 times of El Salvador's population.
  - m00dy 5y ago
    >> Turkey is truly the wild west of illicit money at the moment. Any source on this ? I born and raised in Turkey and I won't let you to bullshit on my country
    - mrtksn 5y ago
      I'm sure you've heard of Reza Zarrab, the Kingston Brothers, Sedat Peker, Tosuncuk that comes to my mind from the recent years. For context, Reza Zarrab is an Iranian-Azeri who laundered Iranian money with help of a major Turkish government owned bank, Halkbank. He flew gold with his private jet for years. He ended up in the witness protection program in the USA. There are very serious allegation of involvement with high ranking Turkish officials. It come to light that Erdogan personally lobbied Trump during his trail. The Kingston Brothers are some mormon community in Utah that stole billions from the US government and laundered money with the Help of a Turkish businessman. The brothers are now in a US prison, the Businessman is in Switzerland and Turkey and US are fighting over who is going to get him. That businessman also has proven ties, multiple photos with Erdogan and other highly ranked Turkish officials. Sedat Peker, a mafia boss who was disowned by the political elite that protected him for years. He escaped to Saudi Arabia and start doing tell-all YouTube videos. He again exposed billions and billions of USD of corruption and drug and arms trade. Many of the allegations were proven or confirmed by those involved but almost no action was taken. When it come time to make a video about Erdogan, he was silenced. At that time Turkey and the Saudis had very bad relations, probably that's why he went to Saudi Arabia. When the video time come to Erdogan, the relationships begin to improve, the saudis intervened and the video about Erdogan never came. Here is his YouTube channel, if you are curious about the Mobster: https://www.youtube.com/c/sedatpekerreis/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/sedatpekerreis/videos He got 180 million views! He promised that the next video will be about Erdogan and that video never came. Tosuncuk, or his real name Mehmet Aydın, is a high school dropout who build an online pyramid scheme in form of a game like farmville. When the scheme collapsed he run away to South America, keeping close to a billion of USD. The exact sum is debatable because he started buying Bitcoins just before the 2018 Bitcoin bull market and run away with unknown amounts of Bitcoins. Just this year, somehow he decided to turn himself in and is promising that he has all the money he collected and can pay back everyone. Again, there were photos of his affiliates posing with the Interior minister and the relatives of the interior minister. Fascinating stuff are happening in Turkey, sometimes I feel bad for those who don't speak Turkish. Serious next level corruption and drama have been happening the past few years and don't get me started about the stuff that happened from 2013 to 2016. Just amazing. BTW, Turkey's GDP has been in free fall since 2013 and it's definitely not a coincidence.
radlad 5y ago
Does 1981 qualify as a millennial? Do generational terms make sense in an international context? Hmm...

by mrtksn 5y ago

inter_netuser 5y ago

isn't the difference that the entities in El Salvador are obligated to take it? Questions or not, that's a different story, but Citibank in Turkey is not obligated to accept Bitcoin, but in El Salvador - they are under a legal obligation to accept it. Citibank is active in El Salvador.

mrtksn 5y ago
Yes, that's the difference. However the volume in El Salvador is so small that it's insignificant in any real terms. It's a poor country with a tiny population. They certainly wont be able to exchange you USD for BTC and vise versa if you try to do it with a significant amount.
- panarky 5y ago
  Classic Innovator's Dilemma.

m00dy 5y ago

1-) If your transactions have low volume, no one is going to question what you are doing. The problem arises when you have a lot of Bitcoins and couldn't really explain where they come from. El Salvador fixes this. 2-) Sending/Receiving USD is not as free as you think. You can get sanctioned like IRAN. Every foreign USD transfer must be checked through a blacklist. That's how it works.

mrtksn 5y ago
Actually, no one asks anything. That's why it's really popular money laundering destination. I lost count of scandals of money laundry, fraud and tax evasions that each are over a billion USD. They tend to come out when something political happens. The amount of cocaine seized this year was in the scale of metric tons with no arrests made on the receiving side. Oh and about your 2). I have some exposure to that stuff and I assure you, it's not how it works. The US does have sanctions but these are lists of names and specific corporations, you don't suddenly get into a blacklist. These lists change with the political situations. Also, there are known terrorist, so if you are not one of those or if you are not politically targeted you wont have problems. If you are in a list, you use private jet to move cash or gold. Turkey is truly the wild west of illicit money at the moment. If you send USD, it will go through the usual SWIFT mechanisms and will be visible to the USA but you can always move cash and gold. Turkey's proximity to major markets and the infrastructure is excellent. EU is just right there, accessible by plane, train, car, bus or boat. UK is less than 4 hours of flight, just like Dubai. Istanbul has a physical cash only gold and USD/EUR/GBP trading center. The city of Istanbul is gargantuous, 3 times of El Salvador's population.
- m00dy 5y ago
  >> Turkey is truly the wild west of illicit money at the moment. Any source on this ? I born and raised in Turkey and I won't let you to bullshit on my country
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    I'm sure you've heard of Reza Zarrab, the Kingston Brothers, Sedat Peker, Tosuncuk that comes to my mind from the recent years. For context, Reza Zarrab is an Iranian-Azeri who laundered Iranian money with help of a major Turkish government owned bank, Halkbank. He flew gold with his private jet for years. He ended up in the witness protection program in the USA. There are very serious allegation of involvement with high ranking Turkish officials. It come to light that Erdogan personally lobbied Trump during his trail. The Kingston Brothers are some mormon community in Utah that stole billions from the US government and laundered money with the Help of a Turkish businessman. The brothers are now in a US prison, the Businessman is in Switzerland and Turkey and US are fighting over who is going to get him. That businessman also has proven ties, multiple photos with Erdogan and other highly ranked Turkish officials. Sedat Peker, a mafia boss who was disowned by the political elite that protected him for years. He escaped to Saudi Arabia and start doing tell-all YouTube videos. He again exposed billions and billions of USD of corruption and drug and arms trade. Many of the allegations were proven or confirmed by those involved but almost no action was taken. When it come time to make a video about Erdogan, he was silenced. At that time Turkey and the Saudis had very bad relations, probably that's why he went to Saudi Arabia. When the video time come to Erdogan, the relationships begin to improve, the saudis intervened and the video about Erdogan never came. Here is his YouTube channel, if you are curious about the Mobster: https://www.youtube.com/c/sedatpekerreis/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/sedatpekerreis/videos He got 180 million views! He promised that the next video will be about Erdogan and that video never came. Tosuncuk, or his real name Mehmet Aydın, is a high school dropout who build an online pyramid scheme in form of a game like farmville. When the scheme collapsed he run away to South America, keeping close to a billion of USD. The exact sum is debatable because he started buying Bitcoins just before the 2018 Bitcoin bull market and run away with unknown amounts of Bitcoins. Just this year, somehow he decided to turn himself in and is promising that he has all the money he collected and can pay back everyone. Again, there were photos of his affiliates posing with the Interior minister and the relatives of the interior minister. Fascinating stuff are happening in Turkey, sometimes I feel bad for those who don't speak Turkish. Serious next level corruption and drama have been happening the past few years and don't get me started about the stuff that happened from 2013 to 2016. Just amazing. BTW, Turkey's GDP has been in free fall since 2013 and it's definitely not a coincidence.

radlad 5y ago

Does 1981 qualify as a millennial? Do generational terms make sense in an international context? Hmm...