Video - Bitcoin - Buenos Aires

Filmed over three days at the beginning of July 2014 in Argentina, “Bitcoin: Buenos Aires” provides a never before seen glimpse into the heart of the preeminent Bitcoin development center in the world.

Transcript

♪ (music) ♪ (man's voice) So when we ask ourselves why does Bitcoin matter in North America? The answer is, it doesn't. It matters far more in every other place in the world. We have it easy here. We have a currency that allows us, to a certain extent, to have predictability.

You go to Argentina--their currency is devaluing at 30% a year. And for these people, Bitcoin is now a choice. Bitcoin offers, for the first time, on a global basis, the opportunity for people to make a choice, to make a choice to use a currency that is outside of the control of hierarchal institutions that have become corrupted everywhere. And that's why I think Bitcoin is much more than just a currency.

(woman's voice) Latin America's third largest economy is headed down the path toward default, for the second time in 13 years. (2nd woman's voice) If Argentina defaults again, the economy will continue to shrink. Most of all, Argentinians are worried about their savings. (man, in Spanish) Dollars! Exchange! Exchange! (woman, in Spanish) Buy and sell dollars, euros, reals! Exchange, man? (man's voice, in Spanish) Exchange! Exchange!

Dollars! Exchange! Exchange! (man's voice) If you're walking by the downtown, you'll see a lot of people saying "Cambio! Cambio!," offering you to exchange your dollars for pesos. (man, in Spanish) My friend needs to sell 50 dollars.

(2nd man, in Spanish) 50 dollars? - (man) OK. - (2nd man, in Spanish) Yes. (man's voice) If there's any type of people that we're going to convince to start using an alternative currency, it's going to be Argentines.

(In French) FREEDOM BEGINS WITH YOU! (man's voice) So here we are at Espacio Bitcoin, Buenos Aires, where the Bitcoin companies, and the community around Bitcoin meet. We have, here, the BitPay offices. (door rattles) Oh, this is lock--this is...

(laughter) Here we are going to have a coworking space. As you can see, on the floors, everything is under construction, as is Bitcoin itself. (chuckles) here ZipZap will have its first offices in Latin America. BitPagos, one of the leading payment solutions in Latin America.

Guys, say hi! Hi! Another good thing is we have long stairs, so everybody will be healthy, after a year of-- of walking through the Bitcoin space. (unlatching door) And if you look around, you'll see we are in the downtown, the financial downtown.

So we hope this will bring a lot of exposure to Bitcoin, to the local community. My name is Sebastian Serrano. I'm the CEO and founder of BitPagos. BitPagos is a payment processor for supporting Bitcoin. We are quite different to most of the payment processors, because we pay out our merchants in Bitcoin. We are obsessed with bringing Bitcoin to Latin America, and we are working hard to solve many of the issues that people from Latin America and emerging countries have.

What I can do is give you an example. You came from the U.S. You had to book a hotel. For sure you used a credit card. So the merchant will pay high fees on the processing of the credit card, compared to the U.S. It will take 18 business days to get paid out, which is a long time, like I said, it's a month of waiting, in a country that has 30% inflation. But not only that.

That money that you pay in U.S. dollars will be immediately converted into pesos, at not the best exchange rate. So by using our platform, they will get paid much faster, at much lower rates, so they save a lot of money, which can-- in Argentina is crazy high, this difference. So that's the major incentive of using Bitcoin to process payments. ♪ (tango music) ♪ WE PREFER Bitcoin (man's voice) Slowly we're seeing the business part starting to grow, little by little.

But all the business interest is also followed by more consumers having Bitcoins, and wanting to spend them. My name is Manuel Aráoz. I am a software developer for BitPay, and I work on building open-source projects for BitPay. (woman's voice) It's hard to secure Bitcoin. As Bitcoin evolves, it's important that we solve the security problem. That's what multi-signature wallets can do. Copay is the first multi-sig wallet where I can fully control the other keys to my Bitcoin. (Manuel Aráoz) The biggest threat I see to Bitcoin is that all your money depends on your ability to secure your private keys, and as we know from many years of digital security experience, users don't know how to secure anything, in fact. So what multi-sig does is it spreads the risk of losing or having your private keys stolen by creating Bitcoin addresses where you require more than one private key to use those funds. That's why I think multi-sig is really important, because it's really easy to use, in fact, it's almost the same as using regular Bitcoin addresses, but it's orders of magnitude more secure. So there's no reason not to use multi-sig.

(woman's voice) May stolen Bitcoin be a thing of the past. (man's voice) Who do I trust? I trust me. (in Spanish) I don't trust the Federal Reserve. I'm Nubis Bruno, and I'm Chief Product Officer at Bitex.la.

My name is Manuel Beaudroit, and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer. Bitex.la is a Bitcoin exchange targeted at the Latin American Market Most people buying Bitcoin right now, in Bitex, buy Bitcoin and keep it a few months. And even just doing that will save them a lot of pesos in inflation. Think about those times when you see an old guy in the U.S.

saying, "You know, when I was young you could buy a cup of coffee for 15 cents, and they give you change," or something like that. Now imagine that that old man is a 20 year old that remembers paying 1 peso for a cup of coffee, and now it's 14 pesos. You will probably understand how people have a need to get something that's not going to depreciate in a very short time. (man's voice) Until recently, Buenos Aires residents treated car dealerships like this one as virtual currency exchanges. It was a way to buy dollars with four wheels.

(man's voice) Restrictions on dollar purchases, and rapidly rising inflation, meant consumers needed new spots to safely park their pesos. And specifically with the U.S. dollar market... People in Argentina need U.S. dollars.

The government needs the U.S. dollar to be at one price... And people need the U.S. dollars.

♪ (ominous music) ♪ (indistinct sounds echoing in hallway) ♪ (dubstep music) ♪ (man, in Spanish) Thanks. (2nd man's voice) Outstanding. Even though it's illegal, it's probably good for the government that there is a black market. Yeah, I mean they are the ones that are selling their black market dollars.

It's a very good business for them to keep it illegal. (In French) FREEDOM BEGINS WITH YOU (Sebastian Serrano) I think that there is a lot to think about and work on, to give access to people, to direct freedom, to direct access to power and democracy, and there are a lot of things happening. La Satoshi is a group of people trying to foster the use of Bitcoin, that does it in more of a political stance than the Foundation, which is a lot more polite. (woman's voice, in Spanish) What interests me about La Satoshi is the ability to put Bitcoin in a social setting, and to attract more people that are not technologists, because the concept of Bitcoin is too embedded in the tech world. So, remove the tech aspect of it, so it can reach more people that can benefit from it in their daily lives. (Manuel Beaudroit) Everyone talks about crypto, and we like to talk about cash, take it to another level, to a more familiar language of the guys on the street. Many people say Bitcoin is really volatile, but when you compare it to the Argentinean peso, where the volatility is always down, and there's no up and down, Bitcoin looks like a more interesting option to store your value.

(Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar) Clearly, this is a disruptive technology, and it's changing the way we exchange value. So if the internet brought so much change, in terms of how knowledge was distributed. Imagine what Bitcoin would do if we change the way we exchange value between people.