Yes.
Panama banking used to be the best in the world for secrecy. Better than Switzerland. But Pablo Escobar pushed the boundaries and helped put an end to all that. The US drug war with Colombia and the cartel’s Panama banking partnership ended when the US threatened sanctions and a gray zone status with all their allies. So the Panamese relented to financial imperialism, seized Escobar’s money, and in the process sullied their reputation like the Swiss and Hong Kongese have done recently. International courts back in the 80s gave no voice to Latin America.
Sorry Bitcoin Beach City, Panama City is the place to be for Latin companies
Then in 2010, more imperialism flexed: the first Obama Administration made good on their campaign promise of closing tax loopholes and introduced FACTA, which hurt Panama quite a bit. This is how I was first introduced to bitcoin. I was permanently banned from Western Union and Moneygram, and placed on an international remittance blacklist. This had to do with the fact I was in the employ of an offshore casino, helping with their double-entry ledger. Bitcoin was a way out. The first casino I worked for went bust because they used a Japanese exchange called Mt. Gox (this was after I left). The second casino went bust in under 6 months because they tried fractionally reserving BTC. This doesn’t work with volatile and deflationary assets though, because as soon as it moved upwards, they were liable for the USD amount for customers looking to cash-out. If memory serves me, the price doubled from November 2011 to February 2012, and it was the second Patriots vs. Giants Super-Bowl game where the latter pulled an upset, de-collateralizing the sportsbook entirely because the wager imbalance was expected to balance out the shady BTC accounting. The third casino blew up because they laundered the Sinaloa’s money via low odds bets (-1000 and lower), and through a sophisticated web sent them to companies the Flores twins in Chicago owned, who eventually turned state’s evidence against El Chapo. The owner of that casino unsurprisingly ended up six-feet-under. The crazy thing is the Sinaloa didn’t use bitcoin in their scheme, because they’d lost a fortune when Silk Road was dismantled, and an operation they ran there went rogue, using the chaos to go dark, emerging as an entirely new competing cartel, keeping the Silk Road profits to seed themselves. The CIA then took the opportunity to run a highly effective disinformation campaign in Mexico-Colombia-Bolivia called Tenderscore, proposing bitcoin was a secret US government project designed to dismantle cartels. They also spread the lie that El Chapo’s second imprisonment in Mexico (he escaped) was due to bitcoin.
Satoshi literally disappeared this same week
To this day that operation has lingering effects, and that’s the reason why cartels have, to the confusion of many, been so analog and slow to adopt cryptocurrency. Consider the leading privacy coin's market cap and tx volume--both abysmal. There were legitimate concerns back then by the US government that cartels might swap their $50B-$100B annual profits into BTC, and that in a few short years, it could emerge as collateral, putting both NAFTA and USD demand at risk in Latin America. Real talk. Of course I had nothing to do with any of this stuff. I’m Romanian with a degree from Fordham NY. And it’s very possible the sources I got this information from were dishonest. I also have no contact with these individuals and didn’t even know their real names.
Anyway, back to Panama’s recent BTC law. It’s important why? Because the barrier for entry is quite low for Latin American COMPANIES. Panama isn’t like El Salvador, which is to say they don't have blackouts every other week, spotty internet, bad roads, crime everywhere, dirty water, ersatz medical care, untrustworthy banking infrastructure, a president that live-tweets BTC trades, or a government seemingly always on the cusp of instability--the latter of which is important because instability can also mean a new administration that waltzes in and bans everything. For individual plebs, getting a Panamanian visa is too expensive. It’s achieved through what’s called the Friendly Nation’s Program. It requires $5000 to be deposited in a Panamanian bank (most are now taking BTC deposits as well), then developing an economic tie. This tie is buying a $200k+ property, or investing $200k in the country, or being employed by a company there. That’s not important though, what’s important is that with Panama's law, we finally have a legit pawn to e4 move. This is a place that Latin American exchanges will relocate to, with plenty of talk already. Game theory suggests the way we get major countries in the Americas (US, Mexico, Canada) to adopt legal tender or zero taxes, are for three places to do it first, ranked in terms of importance:
Puerto Rico
Panama
Cuba
Puerto Rico: because no passport is required for Americans, and no up-front costs, yet PR enjoys all the global relationships the US does. They're prepping their own BTC laws and are interested in adding BTC as a means to purchase large items like real estate. “The Monte Carlo of the Americas,” one politician recently mused. Great place for remote work and excellent demographics for blockchain work.
Puerto Rico
Panama: because it's the well-established banking epicenter of Central America and many Latin American countries. It’s an excellent anchorage for tokenized securities settled in bitcoin (like bonds, companies, and products). The prize of these would be Venezuelan oil bonds, because they have the largest proven oil reserves in the world and enormous gasoline refining capacity. All have been degraded obviously, but they need big investment with no strings. 3.5M bpd in the 90s all the way down to 160k now. Their currency has been stable for months because of oil prices.
Cuba: because of their close ties with Russia, Florida, the Florida political establishment, and Latin America at large. Cuba's currency is also more volatile than bitcoin is, so it's an excellent place to make inroads, prove utility, and brag about--because of the regime it hopes to undo.
Kudos to El Salvador for being the beta that taught everyone else what worked and what didn't. They were an important step. ????
When these three get orange pilled, things get interesting, because I don’t see how bitcoin taxes are more than symbolic legalese and completely unenforceable. Yes you can achieve this already with a hard wallet and DEX (I'd know), but a bitcoin circular economy has not arrived just yet. If I make any major purchases, I’m not allowing a government to swipe 30% off the top so they can send it to support a growing foreign war, pay interest on their debt, or bailout commodity traders. When they can articulate the where and what for, in a transparent way, I’ll gladly pay taxes. Until then, you better find someone that can hack my brain or a ColdCard, because my seeds exist nowhere else, have never touched a live internet connection or internet connected device, and never will. PSBT’s rock. And I now live on a bitcoin standard—which took a couple years to figure out.
That's a power cord that goes into a 9V battery, not a connection.
I’m not buying a new $100k boat in the US for $110k after sales taxes, and $150k after capital gains taxes. That’s called financial irresponsibility and starts costing more than the price of dual citizenships or visas with none of the benefits. I’d rather have five S19j miners to go along with the boat. The tax exemption in these countries will allow individuals and companies to maneuver in ways which heretofore have been the privilege of billionaires and banks, from collateralizing your BTC to dispatching liquidity that LN channels want to borrow, all in the language the masses understand: tap, swipe, click. The day is coming when you’ll tell a startup—“Okay, so I have ten million sats in lending power.”—and it’ll be a significant sum to part with. That’ll be this decade.
If you’re HODLing bitcoin now, look around your group, your family, the circle you run with. You’re the person who will lead them. You are the first mover. You’re the person who will support them. You’re the alpha. This, by the way, does come with responsibility and sacrifice:
You can get bonuses upto $100 FREE BONUS when you:
💰 Install these recommended apps:
💲 SocialGood - 100% Crypto Back on Everyday Shopping
💲 xPortal - The DeFi For The Next Billion
💲 CryptoTab Browser - Lightweight, fast, and ready to mine!
💰 Register on these recommended exchanges:
🟡 Binance🟡 Bitfinex🟡 Bitmart🟡 Bittrex🟡 Bitget
🟡 CoinEx🟡 Crypto.com🟡 Gate.io🟡 Huobi🟡 Kucoin.
Comments