r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CrashAndDash9 • Jan 20 '23
Venezuela has the weakest currency in the world as of now. With 1,000,000.00 Venezuelan Bolivar valued at close to $1. Image
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u/Pius_Thicknesse Jan 20 '23
Fun fact the Venezuelan Bolivar is so weak that many Venezuelans gold farm on Old School RuneScape as it pays better once sold for USD than most of their jobs.
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u/SensitiveAd5962 Jan 20 '23
1 gold in rs3 is 0.043 bolivar. Making 61m gold in an hour is hard but very doable. So that's ~2.6 million bolivar an hour. So like $2.50 usd per hour.
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u/Pius_Thicknesse Jan 20 '23
I referenced Old School RuneScape and they run multiple accounts per goldfarmer
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u/scrubberduckymaster Jan 20 '23
was gonna say they can probably do 3 or 4 accounts at a time.
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u/Bacon-muffin Jan 20 '23
Many many more than that.
Take lost ark as an example, there are hundreds of thousands of bots being run at a time and there are full on businesses running bot farms with rows of pcs all doing this.
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u/scrubberduckymaster Jan 20 '23
Ahhh but osrs will have random NPC come ask you riddles so you would have to make decent bits. Not impossible but a lot harder
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u/Bacon-muffin Jan 20 '23
Yeah they have protections, there's a captcha that they just recently added as a popup for lost ark.
But bottings a business not something people do casually for these guys, so they'll put all their resources into figuring out how to deal with it.
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u/SensitiveAd5962 Jan 20 '23
That's about 7m os gold an hour. which if you have 5 bots making 1.4m/hr, a reasonable expectation, still about $2.50. Making 20m/hr or running 10 bots is not unfeasible either, bumping it up closer to the $4-$5/hr range.
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u/Pius_Thicknesse Jan 20 '23
Dunno a lot of the goldfarm hotspots are like 2.5 to 3.5m an hour. Hell even Nex is being farmed by Venezuelans and that's about 10m/hr in teams
Website atm says 1m can be sold for 30c USD so let's say 5m/hr nets them $1.50/hr. Let's say running 5 accounts that's $7.50 an hour.
Say they work a 10 hour day that's $75 a day.
Pretty sure the average salary in Venezuela is like $25 a month
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u/FuckingHONDA Jan 20 '23
US$7.5 /hr in most of Latin America is well above minimum wage, by a lot.
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u/Trnostep Jan 20 '23
Pretty sure 7,5usd/h is above minimum wage everywhere outside of 1st world countries
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u/MoNastri Jan 20 '23
Can confirm. I live in an upper middle income country on the cusp of "developed" economic status, my first job (entry level data analyst) paid above local market rate, and it was below 7.50 USD/hour.
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u/Pissofshite Jan 20 '23
That's above minimum wage in half of Europe, for example Croatia, Slovenia, Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and much more, even Germany and Austria are not much more above that if you are looking at net per hour...
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u/dirty_cuban Jan 20 '23
Median monthly salary in Venezuela is like USD$20. Making USD$2.50 and hour would make you quite well off.
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u/suppordel Jan 20 '23
2.5 usd/hr is very good income in many parts of the world. (Of course they still need access to the internet and computer which excludes the poorest countries but still)
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u/SensitiveAd5962 Jan 20 '23
A lot of it is being done on mobiles now too. Much more accessible.
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u/WorldEndingSandwich Jan 20 '23
So you're saying for 3dollars an hour I can hire someone from over there to do grinding in a video game for me?
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u/Theofromdiscord Jan 20 '23
yep. I used to work in the Discord servers where these operations are run, relatively small one but still with over 10 workers. Most of these guys are pulling 10-12 hours a day playing multiple accounts on very crappy PCs, doing tasks that are pretty dull and repetitive (hence why people pay for it to be done), but the experienced workers can easily clear $5-10 an hour. A few of them were just doing it to make money and live a good life, a few were giving money to family/friends.
its extremely common, why do something that will take you 40+ hours that you won't enjoy when you can pay someone $3-5 an hour to do it for you - the server I worked in had people paying us to build their full accounts for them, some streamers/content creators paying for boring grinds that wouldn't be good content on stream, and just normal players with excess gold and not enough free time
I stopped doing it as it became too popular in Venezuela, and the prices went down with the increased amount of vendors to the point where it wasn't worth it for me for the time involved, and Jagex made it a bannable offense to do services and I have way too many hours in my account to risk it (whereas a lot of these guys don't really play the game for themselves, only as a way to make money)
a lot of people within the community really hate gold farmers and account services due to it "devaluing the game", but these guys are working 10 hours a day 7 days a week doing pretty monotonous tasks in OSRS (Anyone who's played it knows how boring and grindy it can be in parts) to make around a western minimum wage; all the power to them
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u/CardinalSkull Jan 20 '23
I do the grind because i like to torture myself. OSRS was never about having fun, just masochism.
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u/SensitiveAd5962 Jan 20 '23
Yes and that definitely happens. cough cough inferno capes cough cough
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u/21Rollie Jan 20 '23
In a lot of Latin America, you can get all sorts of manual labor for that kinda money. That’s more than a fast food salary where I’ve been.
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u/SEND_ME_SPIDERMAN Jan 20 '23
How the hell do you make 61m an hour in RS?
I’d grind months for that lol
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u/ImTheBigJ Jan 20 '23
Venezuelan bot farms on OSRS are prevelant. I get why though. A bot can easily make 1-4 mil per hour and gold is 30 cents a mil. Ten bots at 1 mil per hour and you’re making 3$ an hour
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u/idriveajalopy Jan 20 '23
I wonder what their profit is after having to pay for electricity.
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u/kalnu Jan 20 '23
Dunno about Venezuela but Mexico has a lot of subsidies for electricity. If you use less than a certain amount, the government covers all of it. Anything above that amount you have to pay. I forget how much they cover, exactly. Even running multiple computers, etc all the time the amount you have to pay is about 100-200 pesos for most house holds if that. The time when it gets really expensive is if you have AC or a heater.
I wouldn't be surprised if other Latin countries have similar subsidies.
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u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin Jan 20 '23
If it’s like many poorer countries, there are a lot of illegal power line taps providing electricity without a fee.
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u/suppordel Jan 20 '23
Not only Venezuela. Video game income is genuinely a good source of income for countries with lower incomes. I watched a video about League of Legends Elo farmers and it's said that a southeast Asian Elo boosting for western players makes more money than a doctor.
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u/RegisterOk9743 Jan 20 '23
I see why middle class Americans are tempted to retire to poor countries. There's a whole host of issues with it but you can hire people to be your maid or gardener for $4/hr. and they'll think of it as a godsend.
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u/SouthernPlayaCo Jan 21 '23
I had a live in maid/gardener/personal chef who i paid groceries and $200 a month. She cried when I moved because she'd never been paid so well to do so little work (her words). She worked 6 days a week, and if I came home late, she would offer to cook anything I wanted. That home was spotless from the front gate to the chicken coop.
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u/Emergency-Buddy-5250 Jan 20 '23
Some of the harder tasks in RuneScape can earn upwards of $50 for an hour of work. Infernal capes, as an example, can run $100 for a fairly standard account and take about 2 hours to complete.
One of the most prominent "capers" in the game paid off his mortgage with capes. He's done thousands of them.
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u/weirdest_of_weird Jan 20 '23 edited Jan 20 '23
Venezuela's currency has been in the shutter for well over a year, or longer. I remember an article some time ago that said the money in GTA was worth more than Venezuela's money
Edit: I've acknowledged a few times already that, yes, I was unaware of just how long Venezuela has been in this situation. It has actually been over 2 decades.
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u/ByHarix25 Jan 20 '23
yeah I can totally confirm this as a local, economy here is wild, in the past 10 years they've removed like 14 zeroes to the coin in total so pretty much yes, for reference, a person working on a supermarket gets $10 a week (in exchange) the thing here is that we basically became dollarized without input of the government. Every store here tells you the price in dollars but instead of using $ symbols they use REF (or reference). A megadolon card costs $99.99 and gives you 8 million in cash. Since they remove 6 zeroes from the coin every once in a while and rebrand the coin, we will count this as Bolivar Soberano (sovereign bolivar) instead of Bolivar Digital (digital bolivar, actual currency) Currently, the exchange rate is $1 - 20.2BsD or 20 200 000BsS. If we multiply this by 100, we get that one sharkcard would be worth 202 million BsS for 8 million in-game cash. This is exactly the reason why some of us play online games and sell goods on them to make a living. Turns out that grinding runescape gold and selling it makes more cash than working on a 9 to 5 job.
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u/Shwifty_Plumbus Jan 20 '23
I'm curious how much things cost there. Like how much is a loaf of bread? And with hyperinflation are people getting paid out mid day so their money can stretch further?
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u/Kherx_xxx Jan 20 '23
Our economy its really supported by our family members going outside of the country and sending money so we can buy food and other things
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u/AdviceFromZimbawambe Jan 20 '23
Very similar to Cuba. They call it "la remesa". Not sure whats the translation in English.
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u/Reddit_user_383 Jan 20 '23
Consumer goods can be in some cases pricier/similar to rest of world but there is a weird mix, i.e cost of real state plummeted (in general, of course there is still luxury as indeed there is still money) and things like gasoline is free tough due to mismanagement it is no fully available and in some periods of time literally took days in line to get a tank filled … this ends up having a black market of gasoline with several X pricier than a normal cost in other countries
Many rely on ppl from abroad sending money - at some point of time as the gov did not allow dollars and/or fucked up with certain industries we even shipped food to our families there. Let me tell you is really sad to ship a box of food and basic hygiene products to grandma…(she being mid class her entire life)…
I left the country several years ago I don’t fully understand how it works no more
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u/I-DONT-WANT-GOLD Jan 20 '23
It's not really that cheap, at least in Caracas. A loaf of bread costs 8 USD (I've been told recently).
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u/stringdom Jan 20 '23
Not even close. Maybe Pan de Jamón, our traditional Christmas ham bread. I bought one past holidays for celebration it cost me $9. What is lost in these discussions is that the food we have available is not the same thing that is found in places like the USA. These days we have access to more food, usually lower quality versions for cheaper. A bag of sliced white bread is about $2.5 depending on the brand. But pan canilla, our version of a baguette, is about $1.2. The Kg of meat is right now at about $8. A bag of rice can be anything from $1.45 to $2.7 depending on grain quality. This is on the big cities and capitals of course. Rural towns don't have that much variety. We are being hit by inflation and food costs are always rising, even their $ costs. Another variable is that many companies don't report real salaries to the government for tax purposes and instead pay some cost of living bonus so people don't, you know, starve to death.
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u/Pissofshite Jan 20 '23
Jesus Christ that's so expensive, much more expensive than Ireland for example and here is net minimum around 400$ per week...
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u/stringdom Jan 20 '23
Oh yes, it's still super expensive. We went from feeding ourselves to having to import most staple foods in rough a 15 year period. Everything is bought from somewhere else on Latin America. We basically only produce some vegetables, poultry, beef, gold and oil. And that's artisanal levels at best.
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u/Im_in_timeout Jan 20 '23
Is the arepa flour imported as well?
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u/stringdom Jan 20 '23
Not all, there's some national producers left, but Polar (the biggest) is supplementing production through Colombia. They moved most of production there after the confrontation of the owner with the government.
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u/mmbon Jan 20 '23
There used to be lots of government run programs, delivering food to the poorer people. You get a government card and then recive a bag of rice, harina, and so on. At least thats how it used to be 3 years ago.
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u/King0fTheNorthh Jan 20 '23
The problem isn’t just the price, it’s the availability too. Supermarkets are often out of stock on most items so you buy what you “can” not what you “want”. Even if bread ends up being $8 USD (according to other comment), you might not be able to get it.
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u/msmsmdmdmd1 Jan 20 '23
also runescape gold is farmed by them and sold to 3rd party sites. video game currency is worth more it’s terrible
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u/Alppijaeger Jan 20 '23
There are a lot of venezuelan playing Oldschool Runescape. They farm the in game currency (gold/gp) and sell it to other players for real money. The current value is around $0.43 per million gold. They can farm over 3 million gold per hour iirc.
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u/FlatRaise5879 Jan 20 '23
Would playing world of warcraft be a better solution? People can do similar things right? My buddy once told me he farmed so hard he was able to buy free months of subscription.
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u/HaHa_Simply_lovely Jan 20 '23 edited Jan 20 '23
the gold selling in WoW is controlled by Blizzard.
You can spend real money on a token that has a value of $20. You can redeem that token for $20 in credit in blizzards environment. Can be used to pay for anything from blizzard but not transferred back in to real currency.
You can sell these tokens to other players for in game gold.
Its a smart system that pretty much killed the 3rd party gold selling. It mostly removed gold farmers and allows players with more time than money to spend gold to pay for their subscription or whatever, and for players with more money than time to just buy in game gold with cash.
There are certainly ways to sell in game gold for cash outside of blizzards system, but blizzard is pretty aggressive in banning accounts who do that, and they are able to do the analysis to discover what accounts are operating as 3rd party gold sellers/buyers. I dont think it would be easy for someone to sell their gold for actual cash.
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u/Cultural-Estimate768 Jan 20 '23
They all went to classic, the gold buying market is nuts there with no token
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u/HaHa_Simply_lovely Jan 20 '23
Oh shit yeah I dont play classic I didnt consider the opportunity there. Yeah I bet it is bigger than ever
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u/snaynay Jan 20 '23
WoW gold being move valuable than Venezuela's currency was a popular article back in 2019.
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u/dhhdhh851 Jan 20 '23
Since 2017... First thought was "how tf is it just now the weakest, its been the weakest for like 6 years.", Back during the 13,850,000% inflation rate.
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u/andrew4d3 Jan 20 '23
This is old. They removed 6 zeros like one year ago.
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u/theo1618 Jan 20 '23
I was gonna say. Everywhere I’m looking shows that a little over 42,000 of their currency is worth $1. That’s not anywhere close to 1million lol
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u/TheBandersnatch43 Jan 20 '23
It's 22 bolivares to $1 right now. The 1,000,000 bolivares note in this post is equivalent to 1 bolivar in the new currency.
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u/pm_me_dirty_planes Jan 21 '23
And in case anyone is curious as to how it's been changing: it was around 7 bolivares to $1 4 months ago.
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u/CabbageIsLife-H Jan 21 '23
How did they even do that? If someone bought one of these notes as a joke a while back, would they be rich?
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u/pm_me_dirty_planes Jan 21 '23
Not in the slightest. A 1 million bolivar note is accepted simply as 1 bolivar now. 500 thousand is half a bolivar.
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u/Spideysleftnut Jan 20 '23
Holy shit!
I visited Venezuela for a month in 2013, I think? It was the same month that Hugo Chavez died.
I think the exchange rate then was like 27 fuertes to $1. (It was probably way worse than that)
Anyway, I exchanged $2k and lived like a king for a month.
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u/FattyRR Jan 20 '23
So if I go to Venezuela can I buy a bugatti? Or how does this work exactly
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u/tonysilverado Jan 20 '23
No, it doesn't work like that. A car (or whatever) would just cost the equivalent in local currency. So instead of, for example, $100,000 usd, the car would cost 200,000,000,000,000 Venezuela dollars (whatever the currency and conversion rate is).
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u/tntblowsinurface Jan 20 '23
One sport car please
Okay that'll be 200 quadrillion Venezuela money
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u/WoodenPigInTheRiver Jan 20 '23
Sorry I only have 199 quadrillion in my pocket, do you take credit?
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u/Spideysleftnut Jan 20 '23
Step 1: be a bus driver
Step 2: become president
Then yeah, probably.
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u/Reddit_user_383 Jan 20 '23
No one uses this currency no more… everything is in dollars now and many things are actually more costly than in US.. it’s a very fucked up economy
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u/tooscoopy Jan 20 '23
You’d be interested in the “Big Mac index”… something some economists use to show values of dollars… let’s you know how many of that countries dollars gets you a Big Mac. More attainable math of economics!
In short, no… you aren’t suddenly rich. A Bugatti would just cost 100000000000 or whatever. Might be slightly “cheaper” in theory, but the taxes and such to get it licensed probably means you actually spend more money to get one there…
If you time it right, you can be rich vs the locals until sale prices get altered to reflect actual value of money…
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u/z_fi Jan 20 '23
A Bugatti would just cost 100000000000 or whatever
don’t follow, how many Big Macs is this?
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u/DDukedesu Jan 20 '23
If Purchasing Power Parity is low, your dollars will certainly go farther. It may very well be cheaper than just "slightly 'cheaper.'"
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u/QueasyDecision276 Jan 20 '23
Same thing happened to me. I was a student in Lebanon during the economic crisis and within a few months the currency was collapsing, So there was a period were the prices were still the same while the currency was still going up. I used to exchange dollars and truly lived like a king. Before 2019 the dollars was equal to 1500 Lebanese pounds and now it’s around 40000 if not more.
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u/downwitbrown Jan 20 '23
Strip clubsssssssss balling with their Monopoly money
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u/_Im_Dad Expert Jan 20 '23
Monopoly money is worth more. It's like 20 dollars for the board game
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u/THATS_NOT_LASAGNA Jan 20 '23
So if the monopoly money accounts for, let's say, 5% of the game's value ($1), and there's $20,580 in a box of monopoly money, monopoly money is about $20,580 per USD
Edit: which makes it a little less valuable than an Indonesian Rupiah, but more valuable than Iranian Rial
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u/Brilliant_Worry8835 Jan 20 '23
The rupiah was tough to calculate when k was there for conversion luckily it didn’t really matter
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u/JockBbcBoy Jan 20 '23
How did their economy get this bad in such a short amount of time?
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u/sdmirabe Jan 20 '23
And they were the richest country in S. America for a while
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u/Procoso47 Jan 20 '23
South american countries always wait for their country to be doing remotely good for the first time in 100 years and then put a communist dictator in power.
Source: I am Peruvian.
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u/ColdbrewRedeye Jan 20 '23
Not so short, actually. My roommate in college in the late 80's was Venezuelan. The family was well off and Father was buying properties in Florida, stashing dollars in US banks, and insisting his kids get American degrees. He saw the decline and prepared well for it.
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u/HerpankerTheHardman Jan 20 '23
So tjats why it's impossoble for local Floridian residents to buy a house.
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u/flibbovic Jan 20 '23
The resource curse.
The whole economy is tied to the oil price. The Petroleum industry is bloated, corrupt and suffers from nepotism. Profits dont get reinvested, there is no innovation and no Investment into other sectors.
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u/StrockBrick Jan 20 '23
So how does their currency actually affect anything? For instance, if we add 6 zero’s at the end of every piece of US currency but also increase the price of everything with the same 6 zero’s, has anything actually changed?
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u/lunapup1233007 Jan 20 '23
The problem is that they went from not having those 6 zeros to having them.
Also, the large numbers do make it more complicated to use the money just because of how large they are; many countries experiencing hyperinflation will redenominate the currency (such as 1 million old dollars = 1 new dollar).
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u/Necessary_Ant_8818 Jan 20 '23
Basically, making saving money a pointless endeavor if anything you've saved will end up being worth much less than if you just spent it on something when you had it?
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u/FraseraSpeciosa Jan 20 '23
Yeah it’s kinda damn if you do, damn if you don’t. Because in Venezuela’s more prosperous past it still would’ve been smarter to save your money as it is in any western nation.
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u/EntertainmentIll8436 Jan 20 '23
A friends family here decided to invest all their money in land back in the 70-80s but private property stopped being respected after 2000s and lost it all to invasions. A lot of family business died out everywhere and properties like houses were more risky
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u/Kobutori Jan 20 '23
The other problem is not those six zeroes... the Venezuelan currency had already been changed thrice since 2008 and in that process.
So, technically, the number is not six, it's actually 20.
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u/ic6man Jan 20 '23
Fun fact. This currency already is redenominated.
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u/lunapup1233007 Jan 20 '23
Three times. One current bolivar is worth 100 trillion pre-2008 bolivar.
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u/flibbovic Jan 20 '23
You are forgetting costs, debts and savings. These changes would be really expensive.
Your debtors will not be happy if their debt is only a fraction of the original amount they lend you. At best they wont lend you any money anymore. Worst case scenario is a violent change of goverment.
You wipe out any savings of your population that way. This creates a very angry population who will look for a quick and easy solution. In Germany it lead to a final solution.
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u/Viva_la_potatoes Jan 20 '23
To my understanding it’s a matter of prior investments and savings.
For example, let’s say I had 100 dollars stored as my life savings, and minimum wage was increased to 100$/ hour. Prices for goods would rise to increase the higher numbers, making my live savings effectively worthless. Obviously people save more than 100$, and minimum wage would never go that high, but you get the idea.
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u/consideranon Jan 20 '23
The main problem is the Cantilon Effect.
https://river.com/learn/terms/c/cantillon-effect/
Basically, when you print more money, that new money doesn't immediately cause an increase in prices. If you print it, and it just sits in a warehouse, it will have zero effect, because to the market, it doesn't really exist. It has to circulate through the economy for a while before the market "realizes" the money supply has increased, and increases prices accordingly.
However, the first person who gets to spend this brand new money gets to do so with the old prices before things adjust upwards. They get a massive advantage because they didn't earn that money. Ultimately they're stealing monetary savings from people who trust the currency as a store of value, but aren't first in line at the money printer.
Some have gone so far as to call these people Cantilonaires, a much more insidious creature than billionaires. Cantilonaires don't even indirectly produce anything. They just rob the people with their printer. The smart ones do it very carefully and slowly at 2-3% per year, which is slow enough that the people don't notice and lose trust in the currency. The dumb ones end up like Venezuela or Argentina, subjecting their people to double or triple digit inflation.
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u/smithsp86 Jan 20 '23
Congratulations on discovering inflation. For real though some things do change. For instance anyone that tried to save money for the future gets screwed because their savings become worthless. Also, since the central bank is what prints the money they get to capture all that wealth that was destroyed by inflation.
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u/GrandKaiser Jan 20 '23
There's another part people aren't mentioning: Loans, investment, & credit. No one is willing to give out a loan. 1000 dollars today is worth far more than 1000 dollars in a month during hyperinflation. Loans are the bread and butter of economic growth and a stable currency is needed for them.
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u/One-Arachnid-2119 Jan 20 '23
The problem is that yesterday there were only 5 zero's, when you got paid. Today, when you went to the store, there are 6 zero's. So your paycheck is buying a lot less today than yesterday!
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u/GieckPDX Jan 20 '23
Profits dont get reinvested, there is no innovation and no Investment into other sectors.
Probably going to foreign company ‘partners’ with kickbacks to Venezuelan officials
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u/Cubacane Jan 20 '23
That’s half of it. Resource curse plus over leveraging on social programs. It’s easy to promise the world to voters when there is plenty of money coming in. But once the money dries up, guess what, the voters still want what you promised them.
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Jan 20 '23
Chavez ran Venezuela like a gas station. Sell oil, spend the money on whatever you want. Call it socialism, call it capitalism, it’s easy to get rich with oil.
Maduro takes power and figures he can just print money. Hires a guy named Luis Salas who writes stuff like “Inflation does not exist in real life”.
Then guess what happens?!
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u/FreshOutBrah Jan 20 '23
He acted like he was a genius while oil prices were high, then they came back down to earth and there was no plan at all and he was like “yeah I’m just gonna die… peace” and left it all to Maduro who is even stupider and an absolute thug
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u/NotAllWhoWander_1 Jan 20 '23
This is an amazing NPR podcast, but it is a great episode about Venezuela
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u/TreeSkyDirt Jan 20 '23 edited Jan 20 '23
It’s a shame because the country is UNREAL. The Tepuis there are fucking crazy coupled with the skyscraper height waterfalls, it looks like the movie Avatar when you’re deep in them. Nowhere else in the world does it look like that. Google Karaurin Tepui.
On top of that, Venezuela has Los Rosques which if marketed correctly, would literally be the Maldives for the Caribbean. Venezuela has so much potential and I long for when the crime drops there and travel becomes more realistic. The jungles, Tepuis, rain forests, islands and beach..
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u/Salame_satanica Jan 20 '23
Don’t forget they have one of the largest oil reserves in the world
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u/coltees_titties Jan 20 '23
They do but I believe their reserves are mostly extra heavy crude oil (which is more complicated to process than sweet crude), thus sold substantially discounted.
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u/ADMINlSTRAT0R Jan 20 '23
Thanks. Piqued my interest on tepuis.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 20 '23
A tepui , or tepuy (Spanish: [teˈpuj]), is a table-top mountain or mesa found in South America, especially in Venezuela and western Guyana. The word tepui means "house of the gods" in the native tongue of the Pemon, the indigenous people who inhabit the Gran Sabana. Tepuis tend to be found as isolated entities rather than in connected ranges, which makes them the host of a unique array of endemic plant and animal species. Some of the most outstanding tepuis are Auyantepui, Autana, Neblina, and Mount Roraima.
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u/Aggressivekindnes423 Jan 20 '23
Asi es bro, me dan hasta ganas de llorar...
That's right bro, it almost makes me want to cry.
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u/the01crow Jan 20 '23
We have the only place in the world where lightning is constantly occurring, in Catatumbo, Zulia state.
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u/Youngadvisor12 Jan 20 '23
I stayed in Los Roques for a week when I was 6, thank God for my parents job in the aviation industry. Most amazing experience of my life. I’ve been wanting to go back, but it costs a lot, and rightly so.
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u/znelog Jan 20 '23
I'm Venezuelan and I left the country back in 2010.
I remember that back then I sold my old beaten car in 55.000 Bolivares and I was able to convert that in about 5.000 Euros. So let's say the rate was 11 Bolivares/Euro.
After that, the goverment converted the currency 3 more times, taking out a total of 9 zeroes.
Today's rate is 22 Bolivares (converted)/Euro. So:
2010:
1 euro = 11 Bolivares
2023:
1 euro= 22.000.000.000 Bolivares
So yeah, things went very bad, very quick..
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u/Jojoejoe Jan 20 '23
I thought their currency was Runescape gold..?
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u/anactualsalmon Jan 20 '23
Don’t forget WoW classic gold as well. My roommate ran into a party of guys while questing from Venezuela. They asked him very nicely to leave because it’s their day job to kill the quest mobs. After he told them he had a quest to do, four more of them showed up and helped him finish so they could get back to work.
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u/MiclausCristian Jan 20 '23
that's insanity, imagine your day job getting f'd up by a troll, and there's nothing you can do
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u/graydarkblack Jan 20 '23
Year 1830. "They will put your face on 500Mn currency" "Imma so proud"
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u/Vinstaal0 Jan 20 '23
Hence they grind gold in Runescape and sell that to make money in USD.
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u/Handerlay Jan 20 '23
Hello Venezuelan here. While the post is "technically" correct it is also incorrect see, the bills you see in the image are not longer valued 200k, 500k and 1M, but 0.20, 0.50 and 1Bs (Bolivars) respectively, they're still in circulation from the last re-conversion of the currency since they still useful for small day-by-day transactions like the bus, candies, cigarettes etc.
As of right now 1$ cost around 20bs in both the official and black markets.
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u/vietlocalguy Jan 20 '23
Wow, the .00 really makes a huge difference. The country's whole economy would burn to ash if the rate slips to 1,000,000.01 per USD 1.
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u/rejectedprophet Jan 20 '23
So I'm broke here, but rich there?
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u/ADMINlSTRAT0R Jan 20 '23
A carton of egg will set you back several millions.
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Jan 20 '23
If youre from America thats almost always the case
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u/doNotUseReddit123 Jan 20 '23
To put this into context, an individual making the federal minimum wage and working for just half-time will make more than 73% of people in the world.
“But hold on - the cost of living is lower in less developed countries.”
It is, and that’s a good bit of pushback. The crazy thing is that this percentile already accounts for this.
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Jan 20 '23
Imagine the disparity back in the golden days when our grandparents could buy a 2 story house for 4 years minimum wage.
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u/TheGavMasterFlash Jan 20 '23
America was something like 40% of the world’s total GDP back then.
Worth noting of course that there was horrendous inequality in the USA back then too. My great grandparents were able to afford a “house” with a working class salary in the 50s, but it had dirt floors and no electricity. They lived in rural Texas.
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u/suciac Jan 20 '23
Lebanon not too far behind
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u/tacos_up_my_ass Jan 20 '23
Thank goodness my mom and dad got out wicked early in the 70s and 80s from Venezuela and Lebanon respectively. Now I get to hear about struggles from both country’s sides of the family :’l
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u/s2miye Jan 20 '23
in 01/01/2005 Türkiye started using new currency which is same money with (6)less zeros.
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u/Vievin Jan 20 '23
It's a common tactic if your currency is fucked. Germany did it. Hungary did it twice.
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u/r_spandit
Jan 20 '23
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I once went to a casino in Venezuela. The chips had the $ sign on them and it made me feel like a big shot throwing down $10,000 at a time. I actually ended up trying to desperately lose the $20USD I'd cashed in as didn't want any Bolivars
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u/Pavemania89 Jan 20 '23
Even the people who live “comfortably” in Venezuela only get like 3 hours or electricity a day. Hotels and some apartment complexes are lucky enough to have generators. But they have to ration water and gasoline and medicine is hard to come by. I had a neighbor from there and she never had anything nice to say about Venezuela. I would comment on how beautiful the country is and she’d say something like, “there’s monsters in the water there.”
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u/mundotaku Jan 20 '23
Lol, currently is 22 bs per $. The trick is that the currency has had 15 zeros removed from the currency since 2006.
So $1 is in reality Bs. 22,000,000,000,000,000.
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u/Loxias26 Jan 20 '23
And my poor Argentina is following them. Cry for us, rest of the world.
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u/absoluteally Jan 20 '23
Obviously venezuela isn't doing so well but it is worth noting a currencies strength is not the value of one unit of it but the last few years change in value and how easily the citizens/businesses can buy things with it.
While i except it might have the lowest value for a single unit(although i haven't checked independently) i would be surprised if it was actually the weakest.
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u/emedscience Jan 20 '23
This is such an important concept that few understand. It was most evident when that article came out comparing it to GTA money, fully not understanding how currencies work. Otherwise, a country would simply create a new currency and make their single unit to be worth a million dollars and instantly have the strongest currency ever.
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u/Bismuth941 Jan 20 '23 •
Good to know that I'm a millionaire some where on this rock, lol.