Argentina, the once-proud success story of South America, has become a financial punchline over the past forty years. The Economist has refused to include what it called “[government] inflation figures that almost nobody believes” in its weekly list of economic indicators, and President Cristina Fernandez was recently forced to change planes in Morocco enroute to a G20 conference, in order to avoid the humiliation of having her ride seized by a US hedge fund upon landing in Europe.
Now, it seems, Argentines are discovering the virtues of Bitcoin. The New York Times just ran a full-length feature on the rapid and widespread adoption of the crypto-currency as an alternative to the country’s broken fiat system. As the Economist pointed out, “Argentina and Bitcoin would appear to be a match made in heaven.”