Hi Bernard,

Thank you for taking the time to read my work as well as to post a response. It is perhaps a bit of both. Information which I have received comes from publicly available sources as well as anecdotal evidence from the pool of Bitcoin miners which we interact with through forums. It is hard to paint an accurate picture of the true situation on the ground in Venezuela today, short of being exposed to it in a personal capacity.

Information leaving the country is patchy at best and often tends to be nuanced depending on the narrative that one is seeking. However, the majority of miners whom I did have the privilege of interacting with were certainly not buying expensive mining rigs — quite the contrary, they were actually re-purposing antiquated computer hardware such as GPUs and making their own homebrew mining equipment.