Topic: Bitcoin - New form of Budget for poor countries - page 2. (Read 704 times)

It is very risk to put budget in a country into bitcoin. Dont you think only it price up but think the other side. How if the price down in more than 50% less? They loss 50% of budget and what will happen with their built? Think about it.

Not only that, it will be irresponsible for a government to do that, we must not forget that the money the governments levy through taxes is not their money, they cannot do as they wish, if they invested in bitcoin their taxes and bitcoin crashed the government will face bankruptcy and all the politicians that approved that plan will probably be put in jail immediately.

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I remember reading years ago about the united states government devoting a small portion of its budget towards turning a profit to generate funding for certain programs. States may already engage in speculation to a degree. It is known that the US federal reserve made a profit of billions from the TARP bill (troubled asset relief program aka bank bailout). Banks like JP Morgan turn a profit from running food stamps and I wouldn't be surprised if other taxpayer funded welfare programs were run by private institutions which profited financially by running them.

One neglected aspect of this may be, governments owning or running machines which literally print money. Building on that type of financial platform, a team with good leadership could potentially achieve all types of incredible feats which might benefit humanity. For whatever reason that never seems to happen.

I think that a lot of governments will hold bitcoin confiscated from criminals. There is a news story about bulgaria holding billions of bitcoins seized from criminal raids. Governments will likely hold and sell billions of bitcoins, although it wont be because they invested in it.

many businessmen from Latin America are actively engaged in crypto currency and develop it! for example, the Argentine entrepreneur Wences Caceres spoke a lot about this topic! he himself created a very successful product for the storage of Haro's biktoins

All the above mentioned statements can be done,given that the people in those countries should be literate enough to figure out on how bitcoin works if not the whole crypto market. There should be enough resources and updated technology which again leads to massive expenditure. So the government will have to spend for the devolopement and welfare first and those poor people will have to invest ,and it'll take time for them to get a good return,considering all these facts that country would have to borrow more loans which is a death trap and it becomes a vicious cycle.

You could think of any kind of possible things like bitcoin investment only because the bitcoin value now is very high. But when the bitcoin value 5 years ago was very low, investment is not advisable. There's always a risk in bitcoin investment, you'll never know what will be going to happen next.

In 2015, two economists who worked at the Central Bank of Barbados had released a paper titled, Should Cryptocurrencies Be Included In The Portfolio Of International Reserves Held By The Central Bank Of Barbados? This paper examines the potential role of Bitcoin as part of the portfolio of external assets held by a central bank. Using the case of Barbados, the paper also provides a simulation of the effect holding some proportion of their asset base would have had on the stability of the foreign reserves as well as the return on the portfolio of assets.

1. Potential risks, lack of regulation and control over the money supply of Bitcoin would cause price instability, financial instability, and payment system instability.

2. Since Bitcoin reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy at the country level, there should be a greater international cooperation through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by offering quasi-membership status to Bitcoin and holding reserves of it to counter speculative attacks.

The study employed two approaches to assess the viability of Bitcoin in the international reserves portfolio of the Central Bank of Barbados, counterfactual simulation and a Monte Carlo forecasts.

Counterfactual simulations done over the period 2009 to 2015 suggested that adding Bitcoin to the reserve portfolio of the central bank would not significantly increase volatility but could provide opportunities to offset exchange rate depreciations against
major currencies such as the Pound and the Euro.

If 0.01 percent of reserves were invested in Bitcoin from November 2010 to April 2015, while the volatility of reserves would have been quite similar, the Bitcoin reserves would have been $291,926. This theoretical figure is more than 20 percent greater than any of the other major currencies would have generated.

Bitcoin is still very much in the early stages of adoption. As a result, there are many issues that have to be surpassed. The markets for the sale of Bitcoin are unregulated, unless recognised commercial banking, financial, and central banking entities actively participate in the market, the probability of a nation holding Bitcoins as part of their portfolio of international reserves is minimal.

The study concluded, given that Barbados maintains a peg against the US dollar, it is necessary that the Central Bank of Barbados holds enough of various currencies as a precaution against speculative attacks and if Bitcoin is incorporated into the portfolio of foreign balances of the Central Bank of Barbados, that its share should be relatively small, such as the 0.01% model referred to above, it falls within the acceptable margin of volatility with a likely chance of significant returns.

http://www.centralbank.org.bb/Portals/0/Files/Working_Papers/2015/Should%20Cryptocurrencies%20be%20included%20in%20the%20Portfolio%20of%20International%20Reserves%20held%20by%20the%20Central%20Bank%20of%20Barbados.pdf

Maybe in a way it can help.But how about those who have no ideas about bitcoining?How about their gadgets to use?How will they manage to do so?Now is the hard time of buying bitcoins for its value is high.Maybe they cannot take any risk.As far as we know they are poor right?

With the blocksize debate still going on, I doubt poor countries would use bitcoin.

Well you are stating a scenario on the positive side of it sir but what if (hope not) prices of bitcoin will fall? Bankruptcy is imminent and it would be chaotic. Government would not enter into something of high risk and a lot of uncertainties.

I think if the country poor then how can they start investing in Bitcoin. Already Bitcoin price has increased a lot and moving forward towards another milestone.

I think if the government has enough money to buy and hold then it will be beneficial in terms of their developments and their economic growth can be increased with the increase price of the Bitcoin.

You phrased it so simply that it was almost convincing. Really though, when it comes to the economy, things are rarely as simple as they sound. What sounds like a good idea on paper may not work well in practice.

First issue I see with this is risk. Can struggling economies really spare money for investments? Bitcoin is already well established, but is still far from a sure thing. Should a dip happen, would they still be well equipped to deal with hungry citizens? Can they protect their economy from collapsing?

Second issue I see is Bitcoin's volatility. If they were to convert their budget to Bitcoins, the price fluctuations could very well cause them to lose money instead of gaining it. It's also going to take a lot of resources to monitor on a minute-by-minute basis.

Lastly, conversion. Just like USD is to other foreign currencies, Bitcoin isn't currently widely accepted as is. They would have to convert to and from fiat whenever they want to move money. This also incurs fees, so it's not better than USD in that regard.

It will take a lot of  time before it happen, just think how the Government oppose Bitcoin. The Point here is Bitcoin is not yet fully accepted by everyone, The idea of using Bitcoin is not yen even fully studied by the Government, regulation is not even fully implemented. This might idea might work if each country finalized the rules about Bitcoin regulation.

Government wont invest immediately in anything if they know that this might help or not the country. They will first consider the loss and gain if they invest in anything not just the gain. What is the price of the bitcoin will go down? What will happen to the budget? It might not be good enough for the country or worst there wont be no budget at all since it was invested. Since the bitcoin has votality price we don't now when is the best price for the country to sell their investment. Other thing, a government within the country could not decide immediately to sell their investment it would cause chaos. Just to think of it if the a country buy or invest on it would be in a big volume. If they will sell it that will affect the price of the bitcoin. What is the best option there is, let the country invest there people to bitcoin. Let them know about it and earn with it. In that way, economy of a country will develop.

I agree that the concept could be a bit too hard to introduce everyone in the country to it. We may know all about BTC, but for those who don't have access to the internet and all of these bullish and bear runs with bitcoin, they may not know how to keep track of their prices. I'd also assume that countries that have a budget of not more than 10 billion probably have other national issues to tend to, so I don't know if introducing bitcoin right away would be the best idea.

Bitcoin is still very volatile and much riskier than traditional assets like gold - and even though the last year it showed astonishing performance, it would be extremely risky decision to but a whole budget of a country on Bitcoin. Things like public healthcare, education, transport, law enforcement and military and many others are all funded from national budget, so it will go up and down 10-20% in some days it will extremely destabilize the whole nation. The only way to make it work is to put only a small fraction of country's budget into Bitcoin - just 1-2%. This way it will be possible to accumulate some big gains in the upcoming years without taking too big of a risk.

That’s not a smart way of investing a country’s budget. Bitcoin is a highly volatile investment and your argument only sees one side of the coin: bitcoin price growing. What happens if it goes down? What happens if we have another 2013-2015 period?

Countries budgets, if invested, have to be very diversified and most of it has to be in low risk highly liquid assets. So, your argument looks like building castles in the air to me.

I think corporations and big business make profits on a unit basis in terms of net quantity of products sold. They prefer currencies to be devalued to increase the unit of products they can export. While cheaper currency benefit big business they carry a malus of reducing the buying power of consumers.

Adopting bitcoin which could appreciate in value, rather than devalue the way the corporate sector favors, would represent a polar opposite to the economic policies most nations adopt in this day and age.

That is right man, everyone should find a way to hedge their investments with BTC. It is better always of course if you have the private keys meaning the way you transact is in a non-custodial way, but you're going to see a lot of custodial exchanges to make it easier for people to buy and sell crypto. For example, CashApp came out to make it easier for people, but they still don't have control.

Governments cannot invest on what they do not understand and there are a lot of politics involved. Doing it in a government scale will be hard (due to politics).
Cryptos is better for individuals.