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Colombia simply elected a brand new president, and Bitcoin is the hope of each his followers and fearful opposition.

Who Is Gustavo Petro?

As per the NYTimes, solely 58% of Colombia’s 39 million voters confirmed as much as solid vote. With over 50% of the vote, Gustavo Petro was elected president.

This is a significant occasion for the nation. He is their first leftist president, and his economical agenda has been described as “economical suicide”.

As Reuters reported, Petro pledged to “stop new exploration for hydrocarbons and construction of new large-scale open-pit mines, and to put an end to investigative fracking pilots and offshore oil and gas projects, some of which already have contracts.”

He needs the nation to transition from oil to renewable energies. Colombia ranks among the many largest crude oil producers in Latin America, it’s their main export.

Petro’s proposition has been extensively criticized, even by worldwide main members of the left like Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva. Many see this as a nonviable resolution, seeing oil and mining as crucial productions for the nation’s financial system.

Petro has additionally strongly flirted with the thought of cash printing. Last yr, he confirmed assist to the U.S.’s FED cash printing coverage in the course of the Covid pandemic, seeing it as successful. We all know the way that’s going for the greenback, and it’s wanting lots uglier for economies with weaker currencies, like Venezuela’s and Argentina’s.

Money printing isn’t a part of Petro’s official roadmap. A presidential marketing campaign can’t make guarantees for future actions that will be taken by the Central Bank alone as a result of the entity is unbiased of the state. However, some opponents have feared that Petro may one way or the other overtake the Bank’s authority in an effort to implement mentioned measures.

As their first leftist president, Petro’s populist speech gained the sympathy of youthful generations and lots of teams of people that, in poverty and despair, have lengthy waited for a change.

Sadly, now we have already seen how such guarantees can find yourself being a strategy to manipulate the plenty whereas creating an financial destabilization that hangs from an extended chain of corruption and poorly managed tasks. Colombia’s presidential vote was a cry for assist, however the individuals would possibly obtain an empty hand in alternate.

All of those worries take us to the primary character: bitcoin.

Petro Wants Bitcoin To Remplace Cocaine

One of Petro’s foremost worries is the nation’s manufacturing of cocaine. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of this drug. Basically, Petro has bankers, the oil and mining sector, and essentially the most highly effective cocaine suppliers towards him. It is not going to be a straightforward presidency.

But what helped him win?

Petro’s speech included subjects typically ignored by different politicians within the nation, one among which was Bitcoin.

While his opponent Rodolfo Hernández took a stance towards suggesting individuals purchase Bitcoin, Petro celebrated El Salvador’s Bitcoin technique and even proposed for the nation to mine Bitcoin as a substitute of manufacturing cocaine. I don’t assume that’s a transition the drug cartels will simply settle for.

Nevertheless, he has identified that Colombia’s power matrix is already dominated by hydropower, which may assist mine Bitcoin with renewable power.

“What if the Pacific coast took benefit of the steep falls of the rivers of the western mountains to provide all of the power of the coast and substitute cocaine with power for cryptocurrencies?

The cryptocurrency is pure info and subsequently power”, Petro tweeted..

“We can turn the wayú communities, the coal workers of the Cesar region, the black communities of the Colombian pacific coast into owners of these new forms of energy, linked to the computing of cryptocurrencies, and thus we will have a new world.”, Petro said.

He additionally claimed to assist a number of crypto beliefs: “Bitcoin removes issuing power from the states and the seigniorage of the currency from the banks. it is a community currency that is based on the trust of those who carry out transactions with it, since it is based on a blockchain, trust is measured and grows, hence its strength.”

But this appears to straight contradict his recurrent proposal of printing cash as an answer for the nation’s financial system.

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The Opponents Also Like BTC

Some cheered the presidential outcomes, and a few feared them. Intellectuals, economists, and even bitcoiners world wide preserve criticizing his formidable guarantees and hope the subsequent 4 years of his presidency gained’t grow to be catastrophic for the financial system.

Some of the individuals who oppose him and his beliefs see his bitcoin speech as political make-up, however strongly assist the coin and are recommending it now greater than ever, in concern that the nation’s foreign money will quickly begin to free fall.

“Bitcoin is going to be the average citizen’s only means of escape when his policy of excessively printing money destroys an already weak currency like the peso. Not to mention the inflationary effect, destructive for the little middle class that we have in Colombia.”, mentioned a tweet responding to Petro.

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