Венесуэла действительно тайно владеет 60 миллиардами долларов в биткоинах? Эксперты подробно разбирают этот слух

【BlockBeat】Recently, a big piece of news has been circulating in the crypto community: the Venezuelan government secretly hoarded $60 billion worth of Bitcoin. It sounds explosive, but the truth might not be so simple.

Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, an industry insider who has long been engaged in Bitcoin mining in Venezuela, recently spoke up, directly stating that these claims are basically speculation and hearsay stacked together, with no reliable on-chain evidence to support them.

These rumors mainly come from three sources: a 2018 large-scale Venezuelan gold trading rumor converted to Bitcoin, partial oil revenues settled in cryptocurrency, and the government confiscating mining machines to mine on its own. These all sound somewhat plausible, but Mauricio points out — the $2.7 billion gold transaction from 2018 being converted to Bitcoin? There’s not a shred of credible evidence. Key figure Alex Saab was detained by the US in 2020 and only released in 2023 through a prisoner exchange agreement. During this entire period, there was no way to track any fund flows.

More painfully, if Venezuela really held $10-20 billion worth of BTC, that would be completely inconsistent with the $9.9 billion official reserves publicly declared by their central bank. More importantly, to this day there is no on-chain address that can reliably point to Saab or the Venezuelan government.

Even if they did receive cryptocurrency revenues, how corrupt is this country? The SUNACRIP (National Cryptocurrency Regulator) corruption case exposed in 2023 says it all — between 2020 and 2023, officials embezzled approximately $17.6 billion through black market oil trades. Do you think cryptocurrency asset revenues would safely end up in the national treasury? Obviously they were pocketed by individuals.

As for the claim of large-scale machine confiscation and mining on its own, Mauricio directly denies it. Venezuela has long faced power shortages, dilapidated infrastructure, and massive brain drain of technical personnel. Even core enterprises like the state oil company PDVSA can’t operate well. How could it possibly maintain a stable large-scale Bitcoin mining operation? The conditions simply don’t exist.

In summary: Venezuela definitely has Bitcoin, but these coins are basically not in the regime’s hands.