PETRO BEGINS DIFFICULT, BUT IT COULD MAKE VENEZUELA A DIGITALIZED COUNTRY
The intuition of the general public regarding the blockchain ecosystem indicated that there would still be a few years to witness the official issuance of a cryptocurrency by a State, but in advance, Venezuela created its own cryptoactive based on the guarantee of the huge reserves of oil from that country.
However, the step by step presentation, offer and emission of said cryptoactive, the petro, has not been as fluid as a blockchain project should aspire to be. This process has been full of incidents such as: the changes made unexpectedly in its white paper after having been published and the inconsistency regarding the platforms in which this asset would allegedly have been issued (NEM, Ethereum, Decred). A trampled journey that has made Venezuela the first country in the world to issue a cryptoactive, if that title can mean anything at such an early stage of development.
The issuance of national cryptocurrencies is an encouraging reality for governments, since many have already had the opportunity to analyze different properties of the blockchain and the potential that this technology offers at different levels of a society. Distributed accounting technology is currently being implemented by entities and companies in various countries.
Blockchain being a disruptive and innovative technology, which through the elimination of intermediaries and obstacles enables the fluidity of human communications through the Internet, this helps to dispel the borders between countries; limits destined to be overcome as it passes the digitalization of the factors of the sovereignty of a nation.
The global computer connectivity provided by the internet reaches a new level thanks to blockchain, since with a point-to-point scheme, without centralized entities, but supervised and self-regulated by the consensus of the network, it connects its participants interactively in a distributed registry whose information is verifiable in real time by all.
The Venezuelan government ventures into the development and issuance of a cryptocurrency for reasons that, according to the opinion of economists, bitcoiners and other users, have been pointed out as wrong or disloyal; since the authorities only seek to evade financial sanctions and international blockades that other countries have imposed on some government representatives.
In addition, they look for commercial alternatives to be able to use blockchain to carry out transactions of international level with immediacy, either to import or export goods and raw materials, to make payments of the debt and to fulfill other financial obligations; this in the midst of the enormous shortage of food and supplies that the country is experiencing and the high political tension of recent years. In turn, the cryptoactive could provide a solution to the crisis of cash shortage that currently crosses the country.
Despite the confusion over whether the petro would be developed in a bifurcation of the blockchain of Ethereum, Decred or NEM (New Economic Movement), apparently developed in this last platform. This also allows the issuance of smart assets, although it has not developed its potential use cases, but it could represent an opportunity for the government of Venezuela to implement in the future the benefits of blockchain to productive, communication, administrative, institutional infrastructure processes and even for voting, whose transparency is intrinsic to distributed accounting technology.
Other governments will also begin to make use of the blockchain, a technology that anticipates the future of legal procedures, legal processes, international trade, access to public and private services, banking and the possibility of isolated communities and niches to the world. productive countries have a connection with the rest of the world. Thus, national and dedicated blockchains will continue to be created for each type of use case.
At the technical level, it should be noted that blockchain is a decentralized network where its participants agree on its own internal regulation, control through its processing (nodes and miners) is always a topic in which both those who undertake projects, and the public of them, are interested in various reasons.
The scalability of a network should not be sacrificed by decentralization, but in the case of national networks, these could be similar to private blockchain networks, which joining the methods of Work Test (PoW) and Participation Test (PoS) In these new communities, they would be able to establish a self-regulating decentralized scheme, and in turn applied to governance, governmental activities.
This possibility would not only accelerate the hundreds of administrative, financial, legal processes, institutional, etc., that a government must meet, but to ensure that the various sectors of society, participants or not of the network, can review it, navigate through its registry and verify the information that rests on it. The blockchain technology allows the public comptroller on the government administration.
A complete and efficient implementation of blockchain by means of the petro can achieve interconnect to a country that has favorable qualities, such as the abundance of raw material, young and professional population, a good geographical position. Although it is going through an unprecedented economic and political crisis in the hemisphere, Venezuela could one day be the first fully digitized country in the world.
