Venezuela seemingly accepting bitcoin for passports. The authority in charge of issuing Venezuela’s passports show that it accepted bitcoin (BTC) for applications and renewals last week. The rumours started when Ronny Martínez and a few others started tweeting screenshots of the payment service.
“The payment platform SAIME enabled payments with bitcoin (BTC) while the option of payments with credit/debit cards [are] coming soon,” he said. Martínez also tweeted a photo from SAIME’s Instagram account which shows the organisation will accept petro for passports as well.
Additionally, Bitcoin Core developer Jimmy Song tweeted about the situation and confirmed that SAIME enabled payments with the platform Btcpay.
“[The] Venezuelan government is using Btcpay server to accept bitcoin for passport application payments. The same software is being used by [the Human Rights Foundation] to accept donations to subvert governments like Venezuela. If this doesn’t show that bitcoin is the money of enemies, I don’t know what does,” Song wrote.
In addition, the safe “securepay.saime.app” URL of Venezuela’s Administrative Service for Identification, Migration, and Foreigners leads directly to the page on which BTC payments are accepted. Anyone can verify the SAIME payment gateway and see the BTC payment option for themselves.
[image: Flight Network]
