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El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
91–100 of 421 posts
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#92My prediction. This won't be used hardly at all. Why use bitcoin when the USD is also legal tender and superior as a currency in nearly every way? About the only thing you can do more easily with bitcoin is buy other cryptos and send it across borders - sometimes. I would also predict that the failure here would finally get people to stop thinking it's a currency. But I doubt it.
It's pain in the ass and quite extra bit of fees to send money from US to El Salvador. Even when the currency is the same. So using Bitcoin is presumably much better in this situation. 23% of El Salvador's GDP is from remittances, so this is a large use case.
Bitcoin is not cheap either to send, but it has an advantage here I think in fees. The volatility on the other hand could be problematic.
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#93Many other cryptocurrencies are so much better than Bitcoin. Off the top of my head: Monero, Litecoin and maybe Ada (Cardano) sound like better alternatives.
A good heuristic is "if someone extols the virtues of Bitcoin (instead of crypto in general), then they don't understand much about the virtues of Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency."
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#94My prediction. This won't be used hardly at all. Why use bitcoin when the USD is also legal tender and superior as a currency in nearly every way? About the only thing you can do more easily with bitcoin is buy other cryptos and send it across borders - sometimes. I would also predict that the failure here would finally get people to stop thinking it's a currency. But I doubt it.
USD has this little problem and it hasn’t even begun to manifest yet. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. This has been happening since 2008 with no serious repercussions.
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but imagine if you bought a beer for $4 and then next week the beer was actually worth $8 and the next it was worth $7 and then a few months later the beer was worth $50. The whole point of fiat is that it is stable and so you aren't fucking yourself by exchanging it for consumables.
Bitcoin will stabilize in time, when it's big enough to absorb short time supply and demand shocks. It will eventually follow the value of all economic activity through its network. The more economic activity, the less volatility in aggregate. There's a huge cost in "stabilizing" a fiat currency, in terms of debt and inflation.
Bitcoin can’t scale to handle anywhere close to that much volume, and the deflationary model makes stability harder to maintain since it discourages routine usage.
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#96My prediction. This won't be used hardly at all. Why use bitcoin when the USD is also legal tender and superior as a currency in nearly every way? About the only thing you can do more easily with bitcoin is buy other cryptos and send it across borders - sometimes. I would also predict that the failure here would finally get people to stop thinking it's a currency. But I doubt it.
USD requires either a bank account or physical cash. This just needs a network connected device.
What's wrong with either of those? And why are they harder than digital wallets and exchanges?
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but imagine if you bought a beer for $4 and then next week the beer was actually worth $8 and the next it was worth $7 and then a few months later the beer was worth $50. The whole point of fiat is that it is stable and so you aren't fucking yourself by exchanging it for consumables.
Bitcoin will stabilize in time, when it's big enough to absorb short time supply and demand shocks. It will eventually follow the value of all economic activity through its network. The more economic activity, the less volatility in aggregate. There's a huge cost in "stabilizing" a fiat currency, in terms of debt and inflation.
A deflationary coin cannot stabilize without destabilizing the economy that trades in it. https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#98Many other cryptocurrencies are so much better than Bitcoin. Off the top of my head: Monero, Litecoin and maybe Ada (Cardano) sound like better alternatives. A good heuristic is "if someone extols the virtues of Bitcoin (instead of crypto in general), then they don't understand much about the virtues of Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency."
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does BTC change that?
Very few people are willing to accept El Salvador Sovereign currency. Many people (and maybe countries) will accept BTC.
The national currency in El Salvador is the US Dollar. They retired out their own currency in the 2000s.
Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
#100That will be exciting when someone sells some vegetables in the market and then 45 minutes later discovers the transaction was backed out.
That already happens every single day (credit card chargebacks), and is not very easy to do in BTC. I'd have to look into how it works in the lightning network.