Are they being the first country for the sake of being the first country?
No, they really just like wasting 4 bucks on every transaction.
Have you heard of the lightning network? Fees are effectively 0.
El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#22I don't see how this is going to benefit Salvadorans. As much as I try, I can't find a use case beyond money laundering, ransomware and extortion.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
And waiting 10 minutes for confirmation Edit: Lightning networks are bandaids on a prototype cryptocurrency.
y'all most not have heard of https://strike.me/ which operates on the lightning network to send whatever local currencies through btc instantly for little / no fee
And before people ask, it uses the lightning network so it's non-custodial.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#24Is the government accepting it for the payment of taxes and fines? Or are they just forcing businesses to take on the risk of accepting it? I can't imagine what an enormous pain in the ass this is going to be for businesses, given the volatility of BTC.
The president said last night, in a Twitter spaces group, that they, the government, are offering a free wallet that will instantaneously transfer bitcoin to USD to any merchant that doesn’t want bitcoin exposure. He clarified that there will be no obligation for merchants to use this government funded wallet.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
And waiting 10 minutes for confirmation Edit: Lightning networks are bandaids on a prototype cryptocurrency.
Regardless of your opinion of BTC or of crypto in general, 10 minutes to confirm significant monetary transactions that all parties can agree on, without the need for a central trusted authority, anywhere in the world, at any time of day, is a pretty significant achievement.
How about instant BTC transaction using the https://lightning.network/
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#26My 2 cents about it.
https://twitter.com/neiman30/status/1401592760084336648
Editing: sorry for sharing the tweet instead of rewriting the content here, it was a lazy move on my side.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#27Are they being the first country for the sake of being the first country?
No, Japan recognized bitcoin as legal tender some years ago.
But smart move. Even the poorest of the poor have smartphones with a (limited) internet subscription.
So a web based wallet like www.coins.io will work wonderfully for them.
But the reason El Salvador is working together with Strike.me is because they have a service where someone pays you in bitcoin but you can choose to receive all or part of the payment in dollars or another currency.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#28Are they being the first country for the sake of being the first country?
The President of El Salvador doesn't want to get couped. He figures his best bet is to establish a public persona, in English, and appeal to Americans (tech bros) directly.
Its the same in Europe. Russian Oligarchs bought British Soccer Clubs so that they could become public personalities and avoid being assassinated by the Russian Government or other oligarchs.
The political class in South America exists in a different sphere. They are ancestrally directly European, whereas the working classes of the country are ancestrally native American or mestizo. The concern for the every day worker is minimal as is the overlap between the worlds of these groups.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#29> The El Salvador President has previously said the move will open up financial services to the 70% of Salvadoreans who do not have bank accounts. Right. People who can't even afford a bank account would now all be using financial services by paying 10 dollars per transaction.
Shortsighted.
If you make one legal tender, suddenly they all are more useful there.
Doge transactions outside of their system for small things, their corpo BTC chain for larger things? Maybe.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#30I don't see how this is going to benefit Salvadorans. As much as I try, I can't find a use case beyond money laundering, ransomware and extortion.
Going to help the kidnappers get paid. A fair bit of those in El Salvador:
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/el-sa...