Venezuelans and Blockchain
If you believe in blockchain technology, its power and potential to change societies, look at the latest photos from Venezuela. It is among these crowds of protesters on the streets of Caracas that you will find people like you. We want to get there and record this historical moment, put it in our Decent documentary and pass forward stories of those magnificent people. You can help us!
Thinking about blockchain, Venezuelans are not just looking into the future. Many of them use it at this very minute, it already facilitates their lives in these very difficult times. Bitcoin trading volumes have reached a new all-time high there amidst the ongoing crisis. Santiago Siri, an Argentinian who runs Democracy.Earth, a blockchain based project focusing on improving democracy, talked to us about Venezuela and its people as one of the most important use cases. “Every Venezuelan is aware of the relevance of these technologies and when you talk with them you will find a group of people that are very savvy on encryption and they use protonmail instead of gmail or that they use Zcash instead of Bitcoin even. And they are very aware of their privacy and how they need to keep safe online. And for us that’s a perfect context there — that this technology can really serve the purpose of changing people’s lives and helping them to find the means of survival in a hostile and corrupt environment led by a failed government” — he said sitting in his Manhattan office.
Interested, Open and Willing
Whenever you talk to people from that country, you indeed have a feeling that you are talking with someone interested, open and willing to learn more and more about the possibilities dormant in blockchain. On the ongoing course of our film’s production, we talked to Venezuelans who perfectly match Siri’s description. One of such conversations took place during Blockchain On Tour — Latin America or BoT LatAm, the first edition of the trip popularizing this technology, organized by projects having already existing products. In Ecuador, we watched how Swarm City, Giveth, Status, Dether, Appics and Etherisc talked about their dApps and how they can help people in their daily lives. In the crowded hall of Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo in Guayaquil, I met Sergio Suarez, a student who escaped Venezuela several months ago with his immediate family. “The situation over there becomes worse and worse. People who had stable jobs two or three years ago found themselves rummaging through trash to survive. People are dying from hunger, from awful sanitary situations. 20 to 30 percent of the economy is sustained on the money people send from overseas to their families, so it’s not a sustainable model at all. It’s the worst social and economic crisis in a century. Another issue is security. You can’t really walk at night and feel safe. You have to be home by 6 or 7 pm or you’ll risk getting an encounter with criminals. My dad almost lost his life two years ago when he was robbed on the street. The government doesn’t care about people, they only care about enriching themselves. Also with power — there is no check and balances, they control judiciary system” — he described the situation in his country. He heard about blockchain before, he also had an opinion about cryptocurrencies. “I believe they can be an escape for many people in situation as precarious as this one in Venezuela. It is something you can use to unleash yourself from this paranoiac government, to alleviate the economical part of the issue. If this technology is being adopted and used by masses, no one would need to rely on corrupted central governments anymore. Thanks to BoT LatAm meet-up here I already know I can easily send money to my family using Dether. With Swarm City students there can offer themselves some small services and get crypto in return”. Although this brief conversation about technology evokes a thrill in him, and in his eyes a kind of hope is drawn, it is difficult for him to be optimistic. “How worse can it get for the economy? How much more can the government steal? Have we reached the bottom yet? And if they use all the oil, if they run down the economy completely, what will happen to the people?”
It is this dramatic situation that has pushed many Venezuelans to look for alternative forms of activity that would help them survive.
“Sounds crazy but that’s a reality”
That was the case with another of our interlocutors, Eduardo Gomez, a programmer who — despite his young age, before he escaped from Venezuela, got to know the taste of the prison there. Gomez talked about his experiences during the last edition of Devcon in Prague. We met there and had the opportunity to listen to his story and try to understand what brings Venezuelans closer to blockchain. “People are playing games to earn virtual currency. It doesn’t need to be a cryptocurrency. Just virtual curriencies. People are playing World of WarCraft, they farm the accounts, they sell the accounts with the gold in it and it makes much more sense than going to work in an actual job in Venezuela. You earn much more money doing stuff online than working a real job in Venezuela. Sounds crazy but that’s a reality.”
Venezuelans know very well how to use blockchain for their own benefit and to get out of the trap that Santiago Siri descriptively talked about in our interview. “We are in the context of a big conflict between the “land” and the “cloud”. In the land you have governments that have monopoly on force and the law that controls our bodies, that controls the territory; and on the cloud you have a handful of corporations that have the infrastructure that stores our data, our information, our privacy, and — because there are advertising companies, they have a monopoly on our minds. And they keep telling us what to think and desire. So our minds are trapped in the cloud, our bodies are trapped in the land” — he says. What is in the middle should be conducive to empowering people who until now had nothing to say in this puzzle, and blockchain can do a great job here. It is true that Venezuelans dramatically need more basic things than the technology that is constantly developing, but we already know that they can make excellent use of it, becoming a role model for the whole world.
SUPPORT US!
At “Decent. How Blockchain can change the world” documentary, we began crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to reach Venezuela. The campaign is an opportunity for you to support us. In order to explain blockchain, we already entered slums and refugee camps in Bangladesh, investigated the needs of people in Puerto Rico hit by the natural disaster. We listened to the most inspiring projects and minds in Europe, Canada and United States. Now we want to go to Venezuela — a place that should be a great and important symbol for those who believe that this technology can make a real difference. And we need your support.
Marek Osiecimski*
- Marek Osiecimski is the CEO and Founder of Refugium Foundation, a non-for-profit which is created to promote usage of decentralized technologies through films, visual arts, conferences and workshops. Its first project is a feature-length documentary called “Decent. Can Blockchain Change the World?”. Thanks to a community of decentralization enthusiasts — projects and individual donors, the foundation was able to finish ¾ of the footage. It is still raising funds to be able to return to Latin America to finish shooting about the financial exclusion, especially in Venezuela and to start the postproduction. To check how you can become part of this documentary visit their landing page decentdocumentary.com and/or support the crowdfunding campaign.
