Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 421 posts

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#201

Post by peteretep »

philangist wrote: post #46
smoldesu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only skimmed through, but it looks astronomically light on details with lots of Pathos tying it all together. If I was a journalist in that audience I'd be terrified.

I was in the audience and was rolling my eyes at the theatrics. Maybe his emotions were genuine but I felt I was seeing an attempt at clear emotional manipulation. That being said a country (even a very small one like El Salvador) choosing to accept BTC as legal tender is a huge step forward for its utility as a currency and made me optimistic again about a crypto future that’s not just focused on “number go up” and…

How is it a huge step forward? Note that no prices are denominated in Bitcoin in this arrangement.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#203

Post by kadoban »

ffggvv wrote: post #197
kadoban wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

people in ecuador don’t use credit cards. they use cash

Interesting, but not sure it matters. There exist _many_ markets where chargebacks are possible, it's not that big of a deal. It's worked around or priced in and life goes on.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#204

Post by noahadavis »

Geee wrote: post #192
noahadavis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does making governments less stable really not make economies less stable?

Governments that overspend or misallocate capital are a burden to the economy. With sound money, a badly managed country can go bankrupt because they can't print more money. It isn't the fault of the money, while this is the usual argument. It's just the nature of honest money. So, it results in destabilizing governments that are overspending, but stabilizing those that are not.

You don't see the side-effects of destabilizing a government as potentially disastrous for an economy? Governments and economies can have many different forms, but there are clear cases where destabilizing one will destabilize the other and ultimately lead to mass suffering for a period of time. Imagine what would happen if a government in a place like the Middle East or parts of Africa collapsed. History has shown that a new government often doesn't rise up from the ashes without lots of tears and bloodshed. What do you think happens to people's standards of living? How much of their time and money do you think it will take just to get back what they used to have?

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#205

Post by grogenaut »

tofukid wrote: post #182
reader_mode wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter how many dollars the beer is worth? Because you can buy beer for dollars, so if your local beer costs 50$ in BTC it makes sense to sell BTC for USD and order beer. And if your beer suddenly costs 0.001$ in BTC it makes sense to sell it off to someone in USD and refuse selling in BTC. > It is worth the same number of bitcoins yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That's the only stability that is releva…

This goes both ways. Why buy a beer for $5 if Bitcoin is going up? You should just buy Bitcoin instead. Why buy $5 beer if instead you can buy index funds?

Because I want a $5 beer today, and one next week as well. Why buy bitcoin until you die and never have beer? Are you even living at that point?

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#206

Post by vecinu »

vincentmarle wrote: post #80
Geee wrote: post #4

Here's the emotional announcement by Jack Mallers (founder of Strike) who worked with the president of El Salvador to make this happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V8y_IV7XU8&t=76s It's worth a watch to understand the story.

Geez, I’ve never quite seen someone being so emotional about Bitcoin, it’s really a sight to be seen.

Crocodile tears.

I'm not being facetious when I say I would cry to influence my RSUs to increase in value if I could.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#208

Post by RustyRussell »

gumby wrote: post #36

That will be exciting when someone sells some vegetables in the market and then 45 minutes later discovers the transaction was backed out.

To be clear, Jack Mallers works on Strike, which uses the lightning network. Settlement is final on receipt, which is limited by network latency (and db commit time).

The cost is that it's possible for your direct counterparty to attempt to cheat: you've been trading signed bitcoin transactions all this time, and they could try to use an old one. For this reason there's a lockout period for any unilateral onchain settlement (typically 1 - 14 days), and if they attempt to cheat you have that time to penalize them (they gave you a key to do this when you agreed the balance in the lightning network was updated). This penalty can be outsourced, too.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#210

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Well, it this is really true and going to happen, I am glad.

In 2014 I was writing a book on Bitcoin, which I never finished. In the various interviews I did with influential people at the time (Yanis Varoufakis, Rick Falkvinge, Chris Dixon, etc), when offering my view, I used to say that the tipping point would have been a country adopting Bitcoin as currency, and guessing it was going to happen by 2020.

I was wrong, but not by much. And believing so in 2014 wasn't that common.

Post reply on HN