Venezuelan online travel agency Destinia will now only accept Bitcoin for payment citing “increasing restrictions” and economic woes in the country.
Travelers who use Destinia to make their travel reservations can now only pay in bitcoin. The company has made the decision after witnessing the impact of the free-falling Venezuelan economy.
“The economic situation in Venezuela is ever more complicated,” the company explains. “Given the increasing restrictions faced by Venezuelans, Destinia has decided to operate exclusively in Bitcoins in order to further facilitate reservations by local travelers.”
Bitcoin has often been dismissed as a niche, fad, or worse. But in 2016, it has also been one of the best performing assets in the world.
Aided by election surprises, a spike in geopolitical uncertainty and falling price volatility, the virtual currency is drawing in traders, potentially sparking a rethink about its novelty status.
Bitcoin’s dollar value has rallied 124% so far in 2016, to $965 per coin, according to the Coinbase price index. It has been especially strong this month, rising 30%.
For the year, that puts bitcoin’s performance far above the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s gain of 14% and even the year’s hottest commodities and currencies, which include natural gas, up 59%, crude oil, up 45% and the Russian ruble, up 18% against the dollar.
I find it interesting as bitcoin trading might offer a sort of “wisdom of the crowd” measure of just how imminent the Apocalypse is. Of course that would require everyone viewing bitcoin as the best option to preserve their earned value. Other options like precious metals could complicate that, although bitcoin may be easier to store securely and covertly, and easier to use in transactions, assuming the internet remains operational.
Clearly the dollar will eventually be worthless, as will most other Western currencies. At some point the US government will have to print and devalue the dollar to pay off the national debt with worthless paper, and keep money flowing to government employees.
If Venezuela is the test case for what we will all eventually be seeing, bitcoin may be the best place to park value, to try and get it through the storm. If the entire globe comes to that conclusion, as it just may, watch out, the sky will be the limit.
Spread r/K Theory, because when it hits, it will rise faster than bitcoin.
[…] Venezuelan Travel Agency Goes Bitcoin Only […]
Bitcoin is interesting as a transactional currency, but not as a store of value. I think someone like you would find fofoa and his perspective on gold as a store of value and freegold theory to be very engaging and stimulating. Highly recommended. His public blog converted to PDF is probably 6k pages.
If you’re at a loss for something to use as a unit of account, how about your own product? (If you have no product, you’re going to starve when the dollar collapses.)
If I overpay my electric bill by $300, it’s credited toward my future electric bills as *dollars*, which would be pretty stupid of me if a dollar bought 20% less electricity every month. But the electric company will have a hard time buying fuel if everyone pays their bills at the last possible moment. A foreign journalist in Yugoslavia ran up a $5000 phone bill in one month but ended up spending only a few cents when he paid that bill a month later.
So the electric company might encourage prepayment by crediting kilowatt-hours instead. Even better, they could allow those kilowatt-hours to be transferred from one customer to another, thereby becoming a medium of exchange. Instead of constantly raising prices, Walmart could fix its prices in “Walbucks”, increase the price of a Walbuck as needed, and allow customers to buy Walbucks to spend later.
And don’t be a libertarian sperg — pass out some of your currency to local cops and politicians so you’ll have allies when the government tries to shut you down.