The Truth about Petro, the venezuelan cryptocurrency.

There is a lot of misleading info on social media and news sites about the Petro cryptocurrency from Venezuela, portraying it as a miracle solution, as good for the venezuelan people and as great for the crypto space in general. Nothing can be further from the truth, so the purpose of this article is to do and in-depth analysis of what it is and the real story behind this lunacy.

First things first, let’s deal with the theory and official marketing, straight up from the government’s website, let’s dive into the Petro Whitepaper.

It’s dated from January 2018. On the first page we have the official logo and two smaller ones, one for the Venezuelan Government and one from a government entity called SUPCACVEN, which stands for “Venezuelan Superintendency of Cryptocurrency and Related Activities”, a new government branch dealing with Cryptocurrencies. I point this out because later they will be key to understand premine allocations and more.

The executive summary talks about its history, Petro is the brainchild of the almighty Hugo Chávez, who in his omnipotence thought about a strong currency backed on raw materials and meant to replace the hegemony of the US Dollar. We can take an educated guess that he must have never heard of Gold, Silver, Salt, Seashells and countless raw materials that served as money…