Greetings, I’m a 44 years old Venezuelan, father of a 4 year restless, curious and healthy child. In addition to my son, my family is composed by my wife, my brother, his wife, their two small children and a seventeen years old lady girl from the amazonian jungle that my brother adopted; all of them are a priority in my life. We also help six (6) families who are struggling a bit more than us. My wife’s family who is composed by 7 adults and 7 kids, our closest friends families including the elderly ones. That will put a total number of 31 adults, 16 kids and 7 people over 70 years old that are receiving our help in one way or another. Food and medicines mainly, just because we can’t buy new clothes.
That was a briefly introduction of our family and the people who belongs to our inner circle. They are with us struggling to get food, medicines, water, electricity, internet and all the stuff a human being need to have a decent life. Now a question mark is opened. Why is this situation happening to us? I’ll explain to you in the next paragraphs.
In the course of recent years in our country, an hyper inflationary phenomenon has been occurring, the reason is simple, venezuelan goverment is corrupt and inefficient. The reason behind this is because they are a drug cartel who don’ care for the fate of their countryman, so they do nothing to keep things going well.
Getting us back to the inflation we can see an increment who gets bigger every month to the point that International Monetary Fund and some recognized companies estimated that venezuelan inflation was over 2,000,000% for the year 2018. To make things worse, now in 2019 inflation is speeding in the first three months of the year surpassing by now the 2.000.000% of last year. We are talking about outrageous numbers like 2.600.000% only in the first 3 months of the year.
What’s happening to my country is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, almost 2,500,000 of my compatriots have emigrated in 2018 looking for a better future for their family, this huge number represented 8% of our total population and the worst thing is that every day the exodus increases; at actual rate the number of emigrants will reach 20% of our total population in the next 6 months. As a result of this, the neighbouring countries are even getting into a state of emergency because Venezuelans has became a social, demographic and economic problem also for them.
I forgot to tell you that Hugo Chavez installed a control over every foreign money that get into the country. They have an organism to put diferent prices to US $ (by imposition of course) and people can only have access to that money if you are one of them or one of the few remaining companies who produce food with their price parameters (example Empresas Polar). What’s the bussiness on that? Goverment people buy Dollars to fixed price (let’s say 10 Bolivars each $) and then they sold it to everybody who need it at black market price (3.600 Bolivars at the time of this writing). People have to buy those dollars because they don’t have access to goverment’s regulated priced dolar and they need them to buy stuff for their companies or go to bankrupcy. This phenomenon helps to create an insane inflation rate that is sumatory with all the other nasty things venezuelan goverment are doing, merging into a deadly economic coctail who can only lead the country to a secure economical dead.
Now then.
There’s at least 25 millon people who still make a living in Venezuela and we can divide them in this big groups:
Oligarchy related to the corrupt government, this includes, figureheads, high profile military generals, businessmen, drug dealers, heads of the world of crime, islamic terrorists, among others, they have benefited to the point of even own millions and billions of dollars product of fraudulent business, drug trafficking and every shady business related to Venezuelan huge mineral reserves, among others. Studies demonstrate that they stole more than 550.000.000.000 US $. Only inside swiss banks they have more than 300.000.000.000 US $.
Historical entrepreneurs who were already based in the country before Chavez and Maduro regimes. They are forced to constantly negotiate the prices of their products under coertion from the government who obligate them to sell their products even below costs with the fear of expropiation or nationalization of their company by force using the army, showing how the communists get their things done.
Middle class or what is left of it. This group even were part of the rich class in the past, their fortunes collapsed with the decline of the country’s economy. Some of them can for now, eat 3 times a day; from time to time some of them can buy a chocolate but they forgot about to take a real vacation or buy some new clothes, shoes, a cell phone. Even buying a pair of socks is being considered a “luxury” buy. Everything is almost impossible to buy now in Venezuela and if you have to buy the stuff it comes with a collateral cost of important things like food or medicine.
The poor, who always take the hardest hit in these disasters, they go to work without breakfast, if lucky they eat something at work, when they get off their work is time to see what they get to eat (even looking in the trash) and if they are lucky again they can eat a little at night. This is a sad phenomenon that happens to 80% of the population of Venezuela (if not more). The minimum monthly salary is below 0.5 $ and one kilogram of rice costs 2.5 $ so, how in God’s heaven they are going to cover their minimun expenses with 0.5$, 1$, 10$?. Poor’s people kids are no longer asisting to schools because they don’t have food to feed them, i see lot of people begging for a piece of bread on my friend’s bakery. They like to help others but is impossible to feed them all without going banckrupcy. Im talking about 50 diferent people begging for food daily in that bakery, most of them children and old people. You can every day see other people fist fighting for the vegetal store garbage. Is sad what’s happening to my country.
Venezuelans are starving to death while the president dances on television.
What does all this have to do with cryptocurrencies?
For me it has everything to do, if the cryptocurrencies did not exist I would be eating garbage in the streets. Our properties, our business; our real state, our investments gave me profit in hyper devaluated bolivars while all the products we consume where and still are priced at black market dollar exchange rate who is far beyond government fixed price as we saw before.
In June of 2017 my brohter and i where in desperate mode because we got too close to have nothing to eat. He had a gaming computer machine with 2 970’s and 3 benq gaming monitors. When he spoke to a friend to sell him the cards, he told my brohter to mine Zcash instead of sell the cards. He explained us everythinghe knew about mining and we just started to do that. When we saw that 2 970’s gave us close to 3$ a day we decided to sell our commercial building in a price close to 20% of market price, our dad boat engine and every stuff we had inside our house, refrigerators, air conditioning units, tires, our cars, motorcycles, everything that we sold it was at rebate price, almost free because we were desperate and nobody had money to buy at market price. After that movement we managed to get 6 1080ti’s, 5 1060’s, 1 1070, 4 970’s and one 980. We started the mining bussines when prices where getting all time highs and we where jumping because we had some money to have a decent life.
That sensation of security last until january of 2018 when Bitcoin started to go down just after hit an all time high of almost 20.000$ and never stopped until it reach something like 5.000$. We passed from an income of 40 to 60$ a day to 12$ a day and everything in Venezuela was gotten worse with inflation getting higer every day. The advantage we had as being a miner was history.
On October of 2018, Bitcoin price was around 6.500$ and a sign of a bull market was ahead, everybody was speaking of what price will Bitcoin hit this time and suddenly somebody offered to buy our hostel and remaining house. It was a really bad price but as we where close to situation like we had before we knew about cryptocurrency, we decided to sell it and switched every dollar to bitcoin.
We bought at 6700$ per Bitcoin and we decided that mining was not an option because we sold our 125kva generator with the hostel and energy cuts in Venezuela where getting more and more common. So, after some thinking we decided to invest in masternodes, we knew about gentarium platform and their shared masternodes where exactly what we needed. Our investment was poorly, mainly because i acted like a dreamer and not with real facts. I convinced my brother to install Logiscoin, Lightpay coin, Qyno, Coin2lay, Cryptoflow, Gentarium and Safeinsure masternodes. 15 days after we installed the new masternodes Bitcoin prices where sinking, we believed that everything was about to stabilice and never eliminated our bad masternodes and sold the coins for good. When Bitcoin was at 3.200$. Our hostel’s money was history and only our investment in Safeinsure was alive. We where broke again. We took deep this time because we invested what we had left and almost lost everything of it. Investing in any business in Venezuela was a crazy movement due to our high inflation rates so we had no choice to keep believing in crypto.
Thank God Safeinsure project was a serious one. When all prices where sinking at blazing speed on 2018’s nasty bear market, Safeinsure was maintaining a lower downtrend rate. As a comparison, whe we bought Logiscoin we paid 4.2$ for each LGS coin and we paid 4.3$ for each SINS. 2 months later Logiscoin worth was 0.6$ and SINS where recovering from 1.8$ and kept raising the value to close to the 3.9$ we have today while writting this article. LGS worth is even lower than before.
My brother was talking to me weeks ago and told me about asking people of crypto sphere for a little help because it was getting impossible for us to keep helping our friends and the people we always do without really affect our families. My brother started to search for some help in social media, he tried Tweeter first and than he mentioned our struggle in a discord general chat. Luckily he got the attention of a kind soul, this nice guy John Davenport introduced my brother to Divi project dev team and they decided to help us. They actually did, they donated enough Divi coin to set up a masternode and every week they donate some more divi coin to build other masternodes. We are using that money to buy some food to help our friends. A day after that my brother was contacted by Safeinsurance CEO who wanted to help us too, they set a donation address and a discord channel related to our problem.
Last but not least, we just received a huge donation from Bitcoin Interest Project who will give us the opportunity to handle food to more than 5.000 people that are living in very sad conditions. And trust me when i mean very sad conditions, just imagine a seven member family eating once in a day with several bananas and a little bowl of rice. That’s the people we are targeting in our helping efforts.
To end this note i want to sent a deep thanks to all the people involved on this humanitarian task, i’m very pleased to see other countries people empathizing with our situation in Venezuela and feeling like they need to do something about it without expecting something for them in return.
To all the people in Bitcoin interest project (BCI), Divi project (DIVI) and Safeinsure (SINS) we want to give you a huge thanks from all the families you guys are helping with your kindness.
Want to help us? Just follow this link
https://cryptowildfoundation.org/donate/