Bitcoin
Venezuela bans Bitcoin mining | OilPrice.com
The Venezuelan government has announced that it will ban bitcoin mining and has seized 11,000 application-specific integrated circuits used to mine the cryptocurrency.
The statement also said the government has disconnected a number of Bitcoin mines as it attempts to “disconnect all of the country’s cryptocurrency mining farms from the electrical system, avoiding the high impact on demand,” Bitcoin.com said. reported.
Cointelegraph reports that the announcement also came after the confiscation of 2,000 Bitcoin mining devices in the city of Maracay.
Bitcoin is a drain on the network due to the amount of electricity it requires. This has caused some oil-rich countries, such as Kazakhstan global Bitcoin mining hubs. However, governments have begun to crack down on this practice, with the crackdown being especially notable in China, where bitcoin mining and trading was banned in 2021.
Venezuela, despite its oil wealth, has problems with reliable electricity supplies amid years of US sanctions and mismanagement. Blackouts in Venezuela are a frequent occurrence, which has made Bitcoin even more problematic for the country than for other countries where the practice is popular.
However, at the same time, the country’s government is very much in favor of cryptocurrencies: the state-owned PDVSA uses them in its international oil trade to avoid sanctions actions by Washington. Last year, the use of cryptocurrencies was at the center of a corruption investigation at PDVSA involving about $21 billion in unaccounted receivables, Reuters noted in a recent report. report about the Venezuelan government’s plans to intensify the use of digital currencies.
According to some of the reports on the bitcoin crackdown in Caracas, this is part of the ongoing anti-corruption effort that saw the previous head of the
In 2018, Venezuela introduced its own official cryptocurrency, the petro, which would be backed by gold and used in international negotiations. Since then, however, the petro has disappeared from headlines and likely use, being replaced by a digital currency called USDT. Also known as Tether, the cryptocurrency is pegged to the US dollar.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com