I had read about this a while back, and wanted to check out if it was still happening. And it looks like it is - in the gold mining areas of Venezuela, people are using gold dust as money.
At all the stores, items are priced in grams of gold. And you can get a standard pack of grocery staples (rice, flour, etc.) for 1 gram of gold.
Here's a recent article on this, in the town of El Dorado: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250617-venezuela-s-el-dorado-where-gold-is-currency-of-the-poor
They live in a town named after the mythical City of Gold and untold riches -- but most of them are poor.
Merchants use scales to carefully weigh the flecks people guard in plastic pill bottles or wrapped in pieces of paper, and market goods are priced in weight of gold.
For 0.02 grams, you can get a small packet of maize meal, for one gram a pre-packaged bag of groceries that includes flour, pasta, oil, margarine, ketchup and milk powder.
What's amazing is that you can even buy cheap things for grams of gold. You can buy packages of tea, for instance, for 0.04 grams of gold.
Check out this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwk8Y3mXwcU&t=267 (In Spanish, but you can subtitle it in English. The timestamp starts it right where they go into the store.)
The narrators are going through a grocery store in El Dorado, checking out prices, and everything is priced in grams of gold. At the cash register, most of the customers are weighing out the gold dust with tiny little scales. Amazing to see.
A package of hot dogs, for .25 grams of gold
The narrator says that in a long line of people waiting to pay, they were the only ones who paid in dollars, everyone else paid in gold dust.
This research left me wondering two things:
- Do they know much about Bitcoin in that area?
- Are the grocery stores better stocked there, than in the non gold-mining areas of Venezuela?
I'm a native of that country, and regarding the question of whether grocery stores are better stocked there than in the non-gold mining areas of Venezuela:
In the capital, Caracas, they have everything. They live in a "millionaire bubble" where everything is fine and there are no needs.
The entire corrupt elite of the current dictatorship is concentrated in the capital and the central part of the country.
All other areas of the territory are experiencing difficulties in many aspects, and I would say there are critical areas of extreme poverty!
In those places where they use "gold dust" to pay, it's mainly because there is very little cash in bolivars or dollars, and people prefer to use what they themselves extract from the mines as payment.
Thanks for the comment. Does most of the population live in Caracas? How do the poorer classes survive?
And what is the "millionaire bubble" class making money on? Reports seem to imply that oil production is no longer happening?
Regarding oil, the dictatorship uses it to keep powers like China and Russia happy and on its side!
And we could say that the people in the capital earn their living thanks to the government, which maintains a somewhat stable environment, but only there. Furthermore, after 30 years of indoctrination, the government has managed to make people content with the crumbs the dictatorial elite throws their way. In terms of thought and in many aspects, I dare say there's a setback of at least 30 years.
Same (actually worse) in North Korea too.
Ince you can bring up two generations indoctrinated in your thoughts, you have it under control. That is the rule of thumb.
Are you from N Korea?
No. Just a keen observer of society and polity.
The nazis could learn from Venezuela and North Korea too. They had the Germans under control, but instead of solidifying the base, they sought immediate territorial expansion which brought their downfall.
That was a major failure on the part of the Nazis.
Thanks for your reply.
I completely agree👌
Paying in gold dust is actual insanity. How much of it gets just lost in the wind?
Not even wrapped in plastic to protect it or something like that? Lunacy.
your comment got caught by the idiot sieve algorithm
sorry for using words
In the video, they talk about how very carefully they transport the gold dust, and shake it out to be weighed. And the scale apparatus is surrounded on 3 sides by plexiglass, presumably for wind.
I'm not Venezuelan, I'm Cuban....lol
But when I was coming from Cuba to Brazil, I traveled through Venezuela, and we were in a town called "El Callao." From what I saw, it's a little before El Dorado. The car we were traveling in with the coyote broke down there, and we spent the night. There are gold mines there, and people go and look for gold in them. They leave early in the morning and return around 6 in the evening. It's incredible how we saw all those people coming back at that time with lanterns, headlamps, shovels, picks, etc., all that equipment. A young man approached the mechanic and showed us what he had found that day.
The interesting thing is that since everyone makes a living from the same thing, it's not dangerous to carry gold around; it's typical in those towns.
In the mining ⛏️ areas the population don't know about BTC, they only know about their local currency, " gold dust or tiny nuggets". The main economic activity is mining, so everyone can access to some gold.
The lack of goods used to be everywhere except Caracas.
So interesting...
Imagine you have a little flake of 0.04 grams but the coffee you want to buy is only 0.01 gram. How do they deal with that? Cut it up? Or just buy a few more things till the goods equal the weight?
Probably just like in a regular store - they only sell things in packages that make sense.
I can also imagine the grocery store having some kind of credit system - like you deposit X grams of gold to them, and then draw down from that deposit.
What about XAUT? It's a "crypto" with real gold behind, this is way better than irl gold
Xaut is tokenized by the same company that tokenized USD to Tether (USDT), so I would say it's not really better than gold or Bitcoin.
Not better than bitcoin, as the token requires trust.
But better than gold for divisibility and fungibility.
#1283923 , I explained a little bit in this
u sound like Peter Schiff
Wdym
La triste realidad del minero ya sea oro en polvo o en SAT siempre será un poco de lo que se desea, la justicia humana es mediocre. Jesús le dijo al joven rico -" da todo lo que tienes a los pobres y ven se mi seguidor" - el joven se dio cuenta que era muy rico y se fue ( Mar 10:20-22)
Micromarkets are forming around alternative money
In Caracas, elites live in a “millionaire bubble.” Outside? It’s survival mode. If you mine gold, you spend gold. Hyperlocal currencies = a physical parallel economy.
Gold dust beats the bolivar
Inflation nuked trust in paper. Dollars are scarce. Gold is tangible... and usable right now. A 1g grocery pack is the de-facto “basket of staples” index.
This is what happens when the movement of money breaks. Locals hack the system by going primitive. But primitive ≠ dumb it inspires new rails...
Even if they know about bitcoin, how would they get it and why would they trust it? It comes down to the same basic question. Money requires trust in the network that someone else will accept it in return for his flour, sugar, oil or whatever you are buying.
I don't know if this is still the case, but I remember hearing that Fairbanks has the most active gold economy in the US.
That might just mean something akin to what bitcoin is today, though.