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In bankrupt Lebanon, locals mine Bitcoin and buy groceries with tether
- rdtwo 4y agoCan you actually buy a profitable bitcoin rig at 20k a coin?
- gus_massa 4y ago> He says he is getting 20 hours a day of electricity at old pre-inflationary rates. This is quite common. [Hi from Argentina!] The government doesn't want to recognize the inflation, so they keep the electricity bill artificially low, and that's good for a BTC farm. The problem is that someone has to pay the bill anyway, so it creates more inflation. > Azzi dubbed this new form of money “lollars,” referring to U.S. dollars deposited into the Lebanese banking system before 2019. Today, withdrawals of lollars are capped, and each lollar is paid out at a rate worth about 15% of its actual value, according to estimates from multiple locals and experts living across Lebanon. We had something similar in 2001, but the government officially changed the dollars in the bank to long term bonds (10 years?). Or you could retire some of them converted to pesos with a haircut (20%?). [Some details are complicated, because all off that happened during 3 months, and the restrictions changed each day. We call that it "corralito" (baby play pen) and "corralón" (baby big play pen). There is more info in the Spanish version of the article in Wikipedia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito autotranslation https://es-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Corralito?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en https://es-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Corralito?_x_... )
- Comevius 4y agoNo they don't. Those who can afford a profitable Bitcoin mining setup pretty much never had a problem buying groceries. Those who don't already have such a setup would need to spend a lot of USD on it, but then what's the point. Bitcoin is too volatile and risky, if you have a lot of USD there are far better options.