Venezuela is a case to be studied: it is the second country in transactional volume of cryptocurrencies, losing only to Russia. This has a reason: hyperinflation and a geopolitical reality: embargoes on the sale of oil.

Every time there is hyperinflation, the corrosion of the local currency leads the population to find a foreign currency that maintains the value base of their local currency. In the case of Venezuela, poor and mebargated, the population found in cryptocurrencies a simple way to protect the currency without losing its value to hyperinflation: it proves that cryptocurrencies are more resistant to government interference than so-called fiat currencies.

What is new is that, given the existence of capital controls that limit the purchase of foreign currency in Venezuela, cryptocurrencies — digital, outside the purview of central banks — ended up becoming an alternative. But it is still necessary to exchange bitcoins for bolivars to (try) to buy goods in supermarkets across the country.

When the fundamentals of the economy are destroyed by geopolitical factors, Durkheimian thought on the religious phenomenon enters to formulate his idea of ​​currency as “a belief and a social faith”.

Durkheim, philosopher, scholar of religious phenomena about society and proposer of qualitative methods of quantitative analysis, explains that material phenomena depend more on belief than on mathematical argumentation.

In economics, there are different concepts of money based on the distinction between the so-called commodity currencies, such as gold and silver, and the so-called fiat currencies — based on trust and convertible or not into commodity currencies.

Precious metals did not play the role of currency to avoid the numerous bilateral exchange reasons required in economies based on barter - in the case of double coincidence, the need for the supplier of a good to wish to exchange it for the product offered by the potential buyer .

There is no evidence of the existence of societies in which the market was organized based on barter before the advent of currency.

The prestige of gold and silver in Peru, Mexico, China and Greece would come from their divine nature and their religious use, as well as the ornaments and ornaments used as currency by the Indians of America.

In other words, most monetary icons today, in reality, originate more based on faith than on economics. So, then, fiduciary values ​​somehow have a faith component in their credibility.

Venezuela launched a cryptocurrency, fixed its price and accepted it to collect taxes. This is a leap of faith, in the financial system.

When dealing with trust in money based on social belief, belief in future economic progress, it approaches Keynes' proposal in the well-known metaphor of the beauty contest in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Currency.

Keynes imagines a game in which the most beautiful woman in the photographs of a newspaper should be pointed out, but not for her beauty per se: it is necessary to decide what will be the choice of other readers.

Likewise, the value of financial assets would derive from a game in which all agents try to assess what other agents will assess and so on, detaching themselves from any real foundation.

Existence, as a social reality, does not prevent money from being an economic fact: “It is not monetary representation that is a veil in front of true economic phenomena; it is the effort to liberate and dispense with monetary representation that erects a veil that irremediably obscures the vision and understanding of these true economic phenomena”.

Thus, as in Keynesian macroeconomics, money and finance are not neutral in relation to the real variables of the economic system, as they affect the very traded quantities of goods and services.

There is, however, the role of the State in the formation of this collective belief, which is actually what sets the difference between the currency - which also has the function of medium of exchange and unit of account - of non-monetary financial assets, that can acquire the function of store of value.

There is importance in taxation: ensuring universal acceptance of the sovereign currency—through Keynes in the Treaty on Money and modern monetary theory.

If, on the one hand, these crypto-assets were designed precisely to cross borders and go beyond the purview of authorities, on the other hand, a cryptocurrency would have the potential to be accepted not only as a financial asset capable of storing value, but also as a means of replacement.

After all, despite the almost religious belief in the value of cryptos, not everything that glitters - or is called as such - is currency.

Finally, as the example of Venezuela well demonstrates, cryptomeda can be the means for a new vision of the geopolitical performance of countries: the economy re-indexed in cryptocurrencies brings less impact of economic embargoes, thus producing better social well-being in a country that it is rich, because of oil, but poor because of social upheavals and state and economic imbalances.

In other words, cryptocurrencies would function as a ballast of well-being, escaping from economic concepts and entering the concepts of belief in the power to stabilize the economy.

Thus, cryptocurrencies, in relation to their success, could also be explained from the perspective of faith.

And indeed, some investors do behave like fans of a new religion!