Topic: Greece mulls Euro exit (Read 6900 times)

Just in case Greece opts out of the euro and decides to go with bitcoin, Paytunia is now translated in greek for android mobile phones  

Not mine, from a comment in the Torygraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9293270/Europes-Maquina-Infernal-has-crippled-Spain.html

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And yet this could all end so well.

Greece will exit the Euro - even the Eurocracy appears to have accepted this. It may happen in a matter of days now.

The Greek economy will contract sharply - but then it will start to rebound, as Greeks find they can no longer afford German washing machines, refrigerators or cars and look to buy local Greek products instead. Mothballed factories will be given a new coat of paint and re-start production. They will start hiring again.

Investors with an eye for a well-timed investment will start to take a punt on a Greek revival. Before long it all becomes self-reinforcing and the economy will start to float off the reef where it is currently grounded.

This will happen because it always does. Look at Argentina or Iceland.

It won't take long before voters in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, locked in the stranglehold of Germany's austerity blitz,  become envious at the optimism pouring out of Greece. The clamour for exit will become deafening and unstoppable.

The Euro will unravel, and with it the European Project - a wicked, undemocratic, crony capitalist domesday machine worse than anything Ayn Rand ever conjured up  - will disintegrate.

The collapse of the Euro is to be welcomed. Bring it on.

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Yep that's happening now. Greek capital is leaving the country in droves. So far there is no capital control over the usual limits to transfers and the scaremongering of having to declare it all. Greeks move a lot of money out of the bank system and they are not simply going to put it in a bank to transfer it to an exchange. That's a limitation there. But for smaller quantities there's certainly no problem.

Here in the UK I know people coming from Greece to buy (incredibly overpriced) property. Granted, a minority of Greeks can afford to buy property in London at current prices without any loans or mortgages (neither can I or most people living here). They know they're paying a high premium but they are willing to pay it to avoid a lock-in similar to Argentinian "corralito" from 2001. That's how bad it is.

What kind of capital control is being implemented? If they can just transfer EUR to some bank in Poland (intersango), the how is capital flow controlled at all? Money just left country, right?

Or, maybe they'll look at bitcoin and like it better for it's monetary properties than fiat and just KEEP THEM In that case all that's needed is some guy selling bitcoin for EUR in greece. This guy would face the same problem then, however, right? So I don't think this can work.

I've given lower-denomination physical bitcoin some thought a while back. Problem is of course the production cost. Best idea I was able to come up with back then: print tiny qr-code with privkey on a about 0.5 cm x 1.0 cm size paper, print address on other side and fold so that privkey is not visible, put everything into a drop of transparent casting resin which can be opened by hammer to redeem. Now against conterfeiting, I don't know, maybe include a hologram after all. Any ideas?

They can do that no problem. They can transfer money anywhere in the eurozone... so far they haven't pulled off! They can deposit to Intersango or MtGox just as easily as you can.

He would use the euro to buy more BTC to sell (and/or keep his stash secured or move it abroad like his clients), and so on and on. Just the how is debatable: even for him would be better to stay at large from banks as much as possible.

Sure... but how would this seller get his € out of Greece? Is he Geek and willing to keep his money in Greece?

S/t like that may be done in a legal way. In Greece you would have just to sell bitcoins for euros, and maybe sometimes offering some help to send them. This should still be legal (until they outlaw bitcoins).

Now, Greeks are exporting billions of euros and many of them find attractive to export capital undetected in order to not pay taxes on it; that's why they may like bitcoins. The only difficulty might be finding someone in Switzerland or wherever they want to export their money available to exchange their bitcoin for cash in person at a decent rate, assuming that they do not want use exchange agencies. I do not think that many of them would be ready to use confidently the OTC market (which is too mostly dependent on bank transactions).

Even if we may be a bit late for this, a second opportunity may likely come after the re-dracmatization, when much exported capitals will likely return, again ideally undetected, to take advantage of the huge devaluation. Then there would be quite some local demand to buy dracmas with BTC.

No idea and I personally probably fear the monopoly on violence a bit too much in order to engage in breaking the capital control rules in a foreign country. But I imagine someone will want to take that risk and facilitate capital flow out of the country and instead of smuggling cash they can do it with bitcoins.

That's nice in some contexts (not only the one of this topic), but they're too expensive right now to be given away at large quantities... perhaps casacius should start doing some 100 and 50 mBTC coins (or lower, if viable)

Awesome! Now we are getting somewhere! How would you envision such a service working?

This is great. Exactly the kind of thing we need.

Back to the OP, I posted a suggestion for a Greek sub-forum:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/greek-subforum-in-the-local-section-82734

Healthy discussions amongst the Greeks and the right promotional material translated by the forum users will help to promote the cause. I'd appreciate any +1's on the topic to get the forum admins to notice. For the record, theres nothing in it for me as I dont speak Greek.

Would that generate activity in the ballpark of several million regular users making several daily transactions?

Would Bitcoin withstand that a few million people started using it regularly? Not that I think it's feasible to achieve that kind of success short-term, but unless there has been some late breakthrough I'm not aware of, blockchain bloat would be terrible with that kind of activity.

That's the only thing that has any chance of some traction since Bitcoin is so far out of their general population's world view making it extremely hard to accept as valid. But a path to avoid capital controls is surely going be attractive once their government starts limiting people's freedom with their money.

Yes, to the Greek People. Sorry for mistaking the Greek Government as being run by the 'People'. That was foolish of me.

No way. The Greek government is in a mess is because they won't/can't balance their budget (even within the 3% leeway allowed by the Euro rules). If Greece leaves the Euro, it will be to a currency of its own that it can inflate ad lib.

Bitcoin has nothing of value to offer to the Greek government. To the Greek people, on the other hand...