When Crypto Actually Helps People: Venezuela, Remittances, and Plastic Bank

Book: Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption
Author: Erica Stanford
ISBN: 9781398600683

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After nine chapters of scams, faked deaths, and missing billions, Erica Stanford finally asks the question the whole book has been building toward: what is crypto actually good for?

Chapter 10 is the hope chapter. And honestly, it earns it. Not with hype. With real examples of people using this technology because they have no other choice.

Venezuela: when banknotes are worth less than toilet paper

Do a Google image search for “buy a chicken in Venezuela.” You will see stacks of bolivares taller than the chicken itself. At one point it took 14.6 million bolivares to buy one bird. A single toilet roll cost 2.6 million. Some people literally use banknotes as toilet paper because the notes are worth less than the roll.

Workers collect wages in suitcases. Supermarket trips mean wheelbarrows of cash. The biggest bill is 100,000 bolivares, worth about $0.23. You need around 25 of them just to buy a kilogram of pasta.

Hyperinflation has wrecked the country. Minimum wage fluctuates in millions of bolivares but can be as little as $1 a month at black-market rates. The government stopped publishing inflation figures years ago. Independent estimates run up to 10 million percent. In one year, the currency lost 97.5 percent against the dollar.

Prices change while you are still in the shop. A university professor might earn enough in a month to buy meat or eggs, but not both. Some employers now pay bonuses in food instead of cash. Workers walk home with cartons of eggs stacked on their heads because eggs hold value better than bolivares.

Petrol is basically free. You can fill a car tank for 200 bolivares. A fair tip to the attendant is 500. A cup of coffee costs 2 million. That is 10,000 times the price of a full tank of gas.

Free fall to crypto

Since 2017, Venezuela’s economy has been in free fall. The country ranks third in the world for national cryptocurrency adoption, ahead of the USA and China. That is not because Venezuelans love crypto as a hobby. They adopted it out of necessity.

Savings in bolivares disintegrate overnight. Families depend on money sent from relatives abroad. Using dollars was forbidden until 2018. Remittance companies like Western Union charge 14 percent or more just to move money home. Venezuelans as a nation hold an estimated $8 billion in crypto.

The government tried launching its own cryptocurrency, the oil-backed Petro. It was widely seen as a failed project, mostly because nobody trusts the government that issued it. Bitcoin, for all its volatility, became a lifeline. It is one of the few ways to hold value and send money internationally without government restrictions.

Stanford does not pretend Venezuela is unique. Countries including the US have printed money at extreme rates. Many people are losing faith in government-controlled currency. For billions of people, decentralized money is not a speculative bet. It is survival.

Where crypto came from and where it is going

The chapter steps back to the Cypherpunks of the 1990s, a small group in the San Francisco Bay Area who believed cryptography could defend privacy against governments and surveillance. On October 31, 2008, someone posting as Satoshi Nakamoto outlined Bitcoin in an online forum. Nobody knows who Satoshi really is. But the idea stuck.

Crypto makes it possible for anyone in the world to send and receive money without a bank, payment company, or government in the middle. That matters because 2.5 billion people have no access to banking. Banks do not serve the poorest because it is not profitable enough.

Remittance fees average 6.9 percent and can hit 30 percent per transaction. That is brutal when you earn a few dollars a day and your family back home needs every cent to eat. Crypto can send money almost for free and almost instantly.

Stanford points to mainstream adoption signals too. PayPal started accepting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, opening crypto to 346 million users and 26 million merchants. Challenger banks with bright cards and better apps now let you store and spend crypto from debit cards. Facebook’s Diem project (formerly Libra) never fully launched, but it shook governments and central banks worldwide. The remittance industry, which Stanford calls barbaric in how it squeezes the poorest, finally has real competition.

Plastic and oceans: the happy story

This is the chapter’s best moment. Wherever you live, plastic you throw away may end up in the ocean. Only 9 percent of plastic produced gets recycled. By 2050, there could be more plastic in the oceans than fish. Much of it comes from poor coastal communities with no waste management.

Waste plastic was worthless. Picking it up was a luxury for people already struggling to feed their families. Past initiatives paid collectors in cash, which gets stolen too easily.

A Canadian startup called Plastic Bank changed that. Collectors bring waste plastic to local “plastic banks” and exchange it for digital money stored in a wallet on a cheap smartphone. If the phone is stolen, the money stays safe. For the first time, these people can save, budget ahead, and build a credit history. They can also trade plastic for food, cleaning products, or school fees instead of cash.

Thousands of people who never had bank accounts now have digital identities and access to loans for housing or education. Communities get income. Oceans get cleaner. All of it runs on the same technology underneath cryptocurrency: instant micro-payments, digital wallets, and financial access without a traditional bank.

Why this chapter matters

Stanford is upfront that scams have masked crypto’s real potential. OneCoin, Bitconnect, PlusToken, and all the rest gave the industry a terrible reputation. She does not ask you to forget that. She asks you to separate the fraud from the technology.

For Venezuelans holding $8 billion in crypto, this is not about getting rich on a meme coin. For Plastic Bank collectors trading trash for school fees, it is not about Lamborghinis and yacht parties. It is about sending money home without losing 14 percent to Western Union. It is about saving when no bank will open an account for you.

That is what crypto was designed to do. After everything this book put me through, that ending felt earned.