State cryptocurrencies, here comes Petro: news coming from Venezuela, the first country to launch its digital currency.
Il Venezuela is one of the countries in the world to move ahead in the sector of cryptocurrency and digital coins. And, after so many announcements, the country led by the president Nicolas Maduro has chosen to break any delay and launch 100 million on the market Petro, a new virtual currency that is guaranteed by crude oil (the main core business of Venezuela) and that could be a sort of forerunner to the initiative of other countries, such as Russia, which these days are exploring this frontier more or less positively.
To announce that "in the coming days" Petro will make his official debut it was Maduro himself, who then provided some interesting details. For example, Maduro stated that Petro will be completely virtual, given that it will be guaranteed by the 5 billions of barrels of crude oil in the block Ayacucho in the Orinoco field, and for this reason will have a value similar to the barrel (a total of about 5,9 billion dollars, or 59 dollars for each Petro). He added that Petro's political goal is to use it to challenge what he called "the tyranny of the dollar", thus bypassing the sanctions the country has long been subjected to.
In short, the above is enough to be able to understand how Petro will not be so similar to Bitcoin, but it could still represent a useful basis for the evolution of new digital currencies, like the one that is trying to implement Russia, a country where - d on the other hand - Bitcoin is rather strong also thanks to the low cost of energy needed to produce it (while elsewhere mining is very well anti-economic).
Not only: while the governments of many parts of the world are trying to understand how to take advantage of the new financial instruments, it will probably still be the private party that is the boss: Mark Zuckerberg, number one of Facebook, said he was "interested in going in depth and to study the positive and negative effects of these technologies ". And above all, how to use them for your own profit.