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El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

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Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#251

Post by lottin »

landemva wrote: post #199
auxym wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deflation is not something desireable in macroeconomics. It incentivizes hoarding cash instead of spending it on productive things (hiring people, capital investments to improve productivity, etc). Slow and steady inflation is a stated goal for most governments and central banks.

Deflation means I can buy more stuff for less money. This allows me to work less and have more leisure time. Therefore, deflation is desirable.

Apparently you don't understand deflation? Deflation means the price level falls over time, including salaries.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#252

Post by lottin »

jordhy wrote: post #161
djrogers wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the dollar doesn’t drop 30% of it’s value while you’re asleep - something BTC has done multiple times, including recently.

This will stop happening once adopted as reserve currency of major economies.

Exactly, it will never stop happening.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#253

Post by tomtomtom777 »

atweiden wrote: post #64
CyberDildonics wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When that article was written the transaction fees were around $1.50-$2.00 USD which is already a lot for meals and snacks. Now that the average transaction fees are anywhere from $7 - $60 I doubt people are buying much with bitcoin's dialup throughput. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Doesn’t the Lightning Network scale to millions of transactions per second, which is what El Salvador will be using? Fees are miniscule on LN, as well.

> .. millions of transactions per second, which is what El Salvador will be using?

Why would that be what El Salvador is using? That is such a weird notion, and one of the reasons Bitcoin is often incorrectly called unscalable.

How many financial transactions do you think an average person does per day? I don't know but probably not much more than one, maybe even less.

If you handle special B2B cases like high frequency trading separately, financial transactions ceases to be big data.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#254

Post by ulzeraj »

dariusj18 wrote: post #120
rawtxapp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strike is using lightning where the fees are barely a few satoshis (much smaller than cents) most of the time. This isn't the Bitcoin of 2015, there has been lots of new development, lightning is here and is being used with growing adoption (1ml.com), there are other changes coming to improve the base layer itself (taproot, eltoo, etc).

I still don't understand how the lightning network works and maintains the important blockchain feature of bitcoin.

Its like a giant bar tab. You have this liquidity pool with the network participants do all their transactions and go back to the chain when when they decide to settle.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#255

Post by qeternity »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #189
antihero wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

Tell how stable it is to the Venezuelans or the Zimbabweans or the Russians. And Usd isn't doing too well in the last 2 years.

Stable does not mean unchanging. People don’t understand that modest inflation in a currency is actually a good thing because it’s a natural incentive to spend, and velocity of money is a critical aspect of economic growth and health. Moving off of the gold standard launched the world into a period of unprecedented growth.

Obviously too much of any good thing is bad, and this applies to inflation as well. But the idea that you’re supposed to hold fiat for long periods of time is absurd and I’m tired of Bitcoin maxis who don’t actually understand money or economics parroting that line.

You’re not supposed to hold fiat. You do something productive: you consume with it, you invest in productive assets, or your lend it (to someone who will do one of the two former actions).

Bitcoin doesn’t compete with fiat. It competes with every other investment asset.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#256

Post by ulzeraj »

atweiden wrote: post #64
CyberDildonics wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When that article was written the transaction fees were around $1.50-$2.00 USD which is already a lot for meals and snacks. Now that the average transaction fees are anywhere from $7 - $60 I doubt people are buying much with bitcoin's dialup throughput. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Doesn’t the Lightning Network scale to millions of transactions per second, which is what El Salvador will be using? Fees are miniscule on LN, as well.

Apparently they are already using it. There is a local company running nodes and publishing their wallet for people to use.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#257

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #111
zapdrive wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh are we back to "Bitcoin is unstable" FUD. I missed the memo. I was still going with the "Bitcoin is bad for environment" FUD. I also loved the "blockchain good but Bitcoin bad" FUD while it lasted, that one was fun.

“FUD” implies it is false. Maybe you can argue against some of those, but I have no idea how anyone would argue Bitcoin has a stable value.

[deleted]

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#258

Post by ulzeraj »

young_unixer wrote: post #93

Many 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."

Bitcoin has problems. Its a known fact. But apparently everything in this weird crypto world is about trade offs.

Every time you hear someone saying Nano is better than bitcoin because transactions are free the same person never mentions the problem with spam in their network.

Everyone who advocates for Ethereum for being a more complex and Turing complete network never mentions that the same complexities invite bugs and vulnerabilities and the chain was actually hacked once. Or that the developer can decide to literally rewind the chain again. Or that the PoS model is a centralizing force that is trying to replicate the current financial system.

Just check the number of people mentioning bitcoin fees without ever touching on the subject of current ETH gas cost.

Everyone advocating for Monero for its better privacy never mentions the challenges of auditing the monetary policies of their chain.

Everything is a trade off but for some reason people are very good at pointing the good parts of their solutions without never disclosing what was lost to achieve that feature and at the same time they are very good to point flaws in the Bitcoin protocol and network.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#259

Post by habibur »

rawtxapp wrote: post #44
Geee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their work is open source and they are using standard Bitcoin protocols. Zap is their wallet https://zaphq.io Strike is a payment app that uses Bitcoin Lightning network internally to settle payments between financial institutions. It's useful for sending fiat currency denominated remittances instantly and without fees. https://strike.me When they released Strike in El Salvador, it was an instant success. The preside…

To add on to that, it's been used pretty nicely in the El Zonte beach town [1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

How a large a "cut" they take from every transaction is the question here.

As for cash,there's no cut taken by any middle man.

And when the central government or bank is involved in pushing a legal currency -- there shouldn't be any cut.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#260

Post by tonfa »

lottin wrote: post #248
rawtxapp wrote: post #28

Even though the market hasn't really reacted to this news (which I suspect is due to the fact that it's proposed/didn't happen yet), this is one of the most bullish news in a very long time in my opinion (even more bullish than companies buying into it). I suspect this will start the domino effect of countries slowly, but surely adopting BTC. It'll probably be the smaller countries first where they don't have great c…

Why would countries give up control over monetary policy voluntarily? It seems a rather dumb idea.

Note that in the case, it's a dollarized country that made an announcement.

(And it would indeed be a lot more suprising if that was a country that's more in countrol of its monetary policy that made a similar announcement).

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