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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

#321

Post by runeks »

gregwebs wrote: post #299
runeks wrote: post #238

Why is no one pointing out that, in order to receive bitcoins on the Lightning Network (LN), you need to lock bitcoins in a payment channel? So, if a consumer wants to send bitcoins to a merchant, either the consumer needs to lock up bitcoins in a payment channel which can only send bitcoins to that given merchant , or the consumer needs to lock up bitcoins in a payment channel to an intermediate gateway, and the mer…

From a quick reading (just spent a minute after seeing this article) lightning claims support for secure forwarding. So there might be an economic way for a payment app to operate the channel.

Yes, the very basis of LN is secure forwarding between payment channels.

Alice wants to send 1 BTC to Bob. Alice is connected — via a payment channel — to Mallory, and Mallory is connected to Bob. To do this Alice can send 1 BTC to Mallory, and then Mallory can send 1 BTC to Bob. This requires 1 BTC to be locked in both payment channels. The only thing LN guarantees is that the transfer is atomic, such that Mallory cannot refuse to forward the 1 BTC (received from Alice) to Bob.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#322

Post by rawtxapp »

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.

El Salvador already gave up that monetary control by using USD, many other countries also have currencies that are worthless and/or rapidly becoming worthless.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#323

Post by lottin »

incrudible wrote: post #312
lottin wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lightning network is for small transactions. That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate. > Somebody still has to spend time and money managing all that cash. I don't know how you manage your cash, I manage it myself, and I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed". Especially in a third-world country, it seems unim…

> That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate. Lightning network has virtually no fees. You were replying to someone who managed to get a "real" Bitcoin blockchain transaction through for less than a dollar. > I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed" I was thinking of the people managing cash registers.

Okay I didn't know that the LN has no fees. How does this network sustain itself economically?

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#324

Post by pastech »

runeks wrote: post #318
pastech wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really "locking" when putting bitcoins on LN actually make them easily spendable with very little fees? Imo, all of those are outdated claims. For consumers, it's easy to open outbound channels (e.g. to well connected nodes). For merchants, it's becoming easier as well. Remember that it's a network, merchants can have outbound channels and "pay themselves" to get back inbound liquidity (can also be automated).…

> Is it really "locking" when putting bitcoins on LN actually make them easily spendable with very little fees? Merchants don’t want to spend, they want to receive. Why should a merchant have to lock e.g. $100k worth of bitcoins at the beginning of the month (in a payment channel connected to a gateway) just in order to receive that amount from consumers during that month? No other payment system in the world require…

Well if a merchant doesn't want to spend or lock anything, it doesn't have to. Consumers and gateways can open channels to the merchant and that's enough for them to pay the merchant.

In the case of a merchant that doesn't want to participate much in the network, gateways have interest in opening to him to allow consumers to pay the merchant for a fee.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#325

Post by rawtxapp »

karatinversion wrote: post #310
rawtxapp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if Bitcoin price turns around and keeps increasing (big if), we are going to see a large scale game theory at play. The countries that have opted in will be in a much better place so that would create a race to get in. The next 5-10 years will be very interesting times to live through, especially after record USD printing.

Why would they benefit? Large scale deflation would be quite destabilising for a country.

Their "net worth" would increase significantly wrt to other countries that didn't adopt it or adopted it too late.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#326

Post by rawtxapp »

bidirectional wrote: post #307
rawtxapp wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's typical volatility, imo, a reaction would have been 10+% in either direction and it was well known throughout the day well before the actual announcement itself.

Or maybe the value of this news is just deemed as <10%? That's a completely arbitrary number which is ultimately only based on the number of fingers humans tend to have.

That's very much possible, but it's still difficult to know that through the noise of the usual volatility I guess.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#327

Post by rawtxapp »

imtringued wrote: post #316
rawtxapp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car's "check engine" light has been on for a while now, but it still runs with no serious repercussions, guess I can ignore it. You see how that logic would be flawed?

In this case the check engine light has been on because you have been running your engine on too little oil (inflation).

Well if I keep running it like this for long enough, the engine might end up being destroyed beyond point of no return is the point I guess.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#328

Post by rawtxapp »

lottin wrote: post #249
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #227

This is what bitcoin - and the world - through non-authoritarian controlled currency, needs. BTC is a currency. People who treat as such - by simply accepting it or spending it - drive it's growth, and more importantly its acceptance. People who treat it as purely an investment stagnate its growth. Feel free to read (or not) my more detailed comment on this concept here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27338320

But bitcoin is more authoritarian-controlled than the US dollar. The US is democracy, whereas the Bitcoin development team is not.

Any changes to BTC require broad consensus of all participants (nodes/miners/users/exchanges/etc).

No one can unilaterally make changes, when they try they end up with forks like Bitcoin Cash. Just take a look at a change like taproot which almost everyone agrees is a great change, the rollout has been very conservatively done despite not being controversial at all.

The flip side of that is Bitcoin is very hard to change which frustrates many of the people who go buy altcoins, but that's a feature, not a bug.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#329

Post by ncmncm »

narrator wrote: post #164
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deflationary coin cannot stabilize without destabilizing the economy that trades in it. https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html

Nobel Prize winner F.A Hayek, who also famously predicted the denationalization of money in the 1970s[1], provided the excellent counterargument to this in the debate with the proto-Keynesians back in the 30s concerning stable supply money vs. inflationary money: https://mises.org/library/hayek-paradox-saving Hayek was later interviewed in the 70s and said he was mystified when Keynes was promoted to godhood upon his…

There is no Nobel Prize in economics.

There is a group that hijacked the name for their own prize, whom the Nobel committee has no contact with. They are, of course, economists, so any merit in their prize is only as much as economists' at large.

The which is, let us say, disputed.

Re: El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

#330

Post by gregwebs »

arcticbull wrote: post #291
samatman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The payment system mentioned in the Fine Article is built on top of Bitcoin, using Lightning Network. There's nothing stopping them from putting various consumer protections and rewards programs on top of that, and plenty of motive to do so. It's definitely a wait-and-see sort of thing, but I don't see as to how betting against it is the obvious move.

Why does the Strike app use LN or crypto at all? I just can't wrap my head around this. They're a custodial wallet for your fiat currency, right? You deposit fiat with them. You withdraw fiat from them. You move it between accounts on their service. They, or a designed entity must hold that fiat on deposit on behalf of users. When you 'send' that money (according to Jack Maller), they buy BTC for you, send it over th…

Remittances with little fees or hassle.
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