Money is stacked up, Venezuelans dig gold in the game to trade

Corruption, monopoly markets and economic sanctions have pushed Venezuela into a full-blown crisis. The currency of this country was devastated and the economy stagnated, inflation skyrocketed. While the local currency has become a stack of paper, Venezuelans have to look for another currency to trade and one of which is gold in video games.

Venezuelans now spend hours playing games, digging gold in online gaming products and selling it to other players for real money. For example, the RuneScape game, a player can earn 500,000-2 million gold / hour and at the rate of 1 million gold / $ 0.05, each gold miner in Venezuela can earn 40 USD / month. This is a relatively large amount of money in a country with a minimum wage of only about $ 7.5 / month.

Normally, the virtual miners in this game will exchange for Bitcoin because this currency is easier to circulate than the Bolivar in Venezuela.

In fact, trading real money for money is nothing new, it took place in South Korea in the late 1990s and gradually became popular in the gaming world. In the mid-2000s, the explosion of online games in China created a large pool of virtual miners. On average, there are about 50,000 virtual miners in the game in China at that time working. It may sound ironic, but these virtual gold miners evaded hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, but agencies still gave up because it was difficult to control.

Of course, having too many virtual miners will make gold in the game devalued, but they are still nothing compared to the 200,000% inflation in Venezuela that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced this year. The official exchange rate for Venezuela is 1 USD for 68,915 Bolivars but the exchange rate in the black market is 690,854 Bolivars.

Meanwhile, 1 USD exchange for 10,085 gold in the game “World of Warcraft”, in other words, gold in this game is 6.8 times more expensive than Bolivar.

Faced with this situation of indirect destruction of the game, many game publishers have sold gold in the game to limit the devaluation of items as well as causing unfair in the game. As a result, gold mining in the game gradually declined after the 2000s.

Even so, for those desperate Venezuelans, nothing is impossible. They continue to plow virtual gold in the game regardless of the devaluation or ban from game publishers.