I had read about this a while back, and wanted to check out if it was still happening. And it looks like it is - in the gold mining areas of Venezuela, people are using gold dust as money.
At all the stores, items are priced in grams of gold. And you can get a standard pack of grocery staples (rice, flour, etc.) for 1 gram of gold.
Here's a recent article on this, in the town of El Dorado: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250617-venezuela-s-el-dorado-where-gold-is-currency-of-the-poor
They live in a town named after the mythical City of Gold and untold riches -- but most of them are poor.
Merchants use scales to carefully weigh the flecks people guard in plastic pill bottles or wrapped in pieces of paper, and market goods are priced in weight of gold.
For 0.02 grams, you can get a small packet of maize meal, for one gram a pre-packaged bag of groceries that includes flour, pasta, oil, margarine, ketchup and milk powder.
What's amazing is that you can even buy cheap things for grams of gold. You can buy packages of tea, for instance, for 0.04 grams of gold.
Check out this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwk8Y3mXwcU&t=267 (In Spanish, but you can subtitle it in English. The timestamp starts it right where they go into the store.)
The narrators are going through a grocery store in El Dorado, checking out prices, and everything is priced in grams of gold. At the cash register, most of the customers are weighing out the gold dust with tiny little scales. Amazing to see.
A package of hot dogs, for .25 grams of gold
The narrator says that in a long line of people waiting to pay, they were the only ones who paid in dollars, everyone else paid in gold dust.
This research left me wondering two things:
- Do they know much about Bitcoin in that area?
- Are the grocery stores better stocked there, than in the non gold-mining areas of Venezuela?