The virtual currency used in the popular video game series World of Warcraft is, as of Monday, worth 62 times that of the Venezuelan Bolivar.
In an article on Monday, Fortune explained how the game’s virtual currency has rapidly increased in value against the Bolivar:
Per Google, one U.S. dollar is worth 68,915 bolivar.
Compare that to the price of WoW tokens, official in-game credits that can be used to extend a player’s play time or buy in-game items. Tokens can be bought with either $20 real world cash or sold for a fluctuating amount of in-game gold. One tracking service lists the current gold price of a token as 203,035 pieces. That works out to about 10,152 gold gaming pieces per USD.
By those calculations, World of Warcraft virtual gold would be worth 6.8 times as much as the bolivar.
However, the author later admits that if you follow the black market rate, as opposed to the false exchange rate set by the Venezuelan government, the currency’s current value is 636,771 per dollar, meaning that the virtual gold is actually worth 62 times that of the Bolivar.
The case is just one of many staggering examples of Venezuela’s levels of hyperinflation that have effectively rendered their currency worthless and pushed the country into the worst economic and humanitarian crisis in its history.
On Monday, the National Assembly, the country’s only democratically elected body, revealed that the country’s inflation rate had reached 13,779 percent in the past year, the highest inflation rate in the world.
Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro has attempted to solve the inflation issue by repeatedly raising the country’s minimum wage, multiple times, as well as releasing higher denomination banknotes. However, such policies have proved ineffective, as they have only pushed inflation higher.
Last month, Maduro announced that he would knock three zeros off the currency and create a new monetary system known as the “sovereign bolivar,” that “would allow people to complete their commercial and monetary activities.”
According to the latest exchange rates, Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of one million Bolivars a month is equivalent to around $1.61, making the formerly oil-rich nation the poorest in Latin America.
Despite the regime’s attempts to rid the country of all American influence, growing numbers of Venezuelan merchants are also only accepting payments in U.S. dollars, raising speculation that the country could follow the example of Ecuador and revert to the dollar in a post-Maduro economy.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
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