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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 01 2015, @10:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-said-fake-money-would-never-be-worth-anything dept.

Thanks in part to Argentina's volatile financial markets, bitcoins are helping people there cut out the banks and government entirely in their financial transactions:

That afternoon, a plump 48-year-old musician was one of several customers to drop by the rented room. A German customer had paid the musician in Bitcoin for some freelance compositions, and the musician needed to turn them into dollars. Castiglione [the bitcoin moneychanger] joked about the corruption of Argentine politics as he peeled off five $100 bills, which he was trading for a little more than 1.5 Bitcoins, and gave them to his client. The musician did not hand over anything in return; before showing up, he had transferred the Bitcoins — in essence, digital tokens that exist only as entries in a digital ledger — from his Bitcoin address to Castiglione’s. Had the German client instead sent euros to a bank in Argentina, the musician would have been required to fill out a form to receive payment and, as a result of the country’s currency controls, sacrificed roughly 30 percent of his earnings to change his euros into pesos. Bitcoin makes it easier to move money the other way too. The day before, the owner of a small manufacturing company bought $20,000 worth of Bitcoin from Castiglione in order to get his money to the United States, where he needed to pay a vendor, a transaction far easier and less expensive than moving funds through Argentine banks.

Do any Solentils manage their transactions in bitcoin? What are your experiences?

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @01:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @01:19AM (#177712)

    > Are you using Firefox or some other buggy browser? I'm using Chrome and it looks like the normal Arial or Helvetica

    If chrome renders the <tt> tag with a proportional font, then chrome is the buggy browser.

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