An anonymous reader writes: If you are a cryptocurrency enthusiast living in a brutal dictatorship, and you use cryptocurrency as a way to evade the restrictions and bad economic policies of that dictatorship, and one day the brutal dictator comes to you and asks you to design a cryptocurrency for him, do you think that designing that cryptocurrency for him will usher in a new era of freedom and wise economic policies? Or, you know, not? The answer is “not,” of course, but I appreciated the naive idealism of Gabriel Jimenez, the designer of Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency, in this story by Nathaniel Popper and Ana Vanessa Herrero. From the report: Mr. Jimenez was just 27, ran a tiny start-up, and had spent years protesting the dictator. Mr. Maduro had not just mismanaged his country into financial crisis — he had detained, tortured and murdered those who challenged his power. But whatever Mr. Jimenez felt about the regime, he felt just as strongly about the potential of cryptocurrency. When the Maduro administration approached him about creating a digital coin, Mr. Jimenez saw an opportunity to change his country from within. If a national cryptocurrency was done right, Mr. Jimenez believed, he could give the government what it wanted — a way to fight hyperinflation — while also stealthily introducing technology that would give Venezuelans a measure of freedom from a government that dictated every detail of daily life. His friends and family warned him that working with the regime could only end badly. It ended badly.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot