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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#91

This is good news in that we will see a real country with decent population use it and fail badly proving that Bitcoin is not viable as a valid currency. Once that is done its value should plummet dramatically. Until now it is not used for any payments and mainly for speculation/gambling to make easy money. Most of the people are just supporting it to hype up the value so they can make most profit.

Or, maybe just consider this, you are wrong and it ends up being very successful and more countries adopt it. For what it's worth, they have already been using Bitcoin in the El Zonte for some time now [1].

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#92
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see someone explaining to their grandmother about having to move her BTC to offline cold storage and storing her private keys securely or she could lose her life's savings in an instant with no recourse

LOL! Very true.. Who the hell has time to figure out all this stuff? I personally think the day the digital US dollar is developed and can be stored in your IPhone. If I can take my locally stored digital dollar and then send it via imessage or whatsapp, then the game is truly over for Bitcoin.

I like physical analog cash even though its a pain in the ass to carry. Cashless society is terrifying to me.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#93
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see someone explaining to their grandmother about having to move her BTC to offline cold storage and storing her private keys securely or she could lose her life's savings in an instant with no recourse

LOL! Very true.. Who the hell has time to figure out all this stuff? I personally think the day the digital US dollar is developed and can be stored in your IPhone. If I can take my locally stored digital dollar and then send it via imessage or whatsapp, then the game is truly over for Bitcoin.

A cryptocurrency backed by the united states could certainly succeed as many people want to do business that way, but the point of bitcoin was decentralization and preventing government control of the currency.

The same people (lots and lots and lots of criminals, but you know, regular people too) who use bitcoin would probably not want a us dollar coin very much.

But the vast majority of people don't use bitcoin at all, for anything... I think a us dollar coin with FDIC protection or whatever protection it takes to make grandma feel safe that her $100k account is protected, would be wildly successful if they tried it.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#95

Is 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 big thing IMO is that taxes won't be due on capital gains for Bitcoin. This could potentially drive foreign investment?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#96
post #82
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to pick bitcoin personally, obviously. Yes, after that you have to launder it, but that's a smaller problem comparatively.

Is it a smaller problem? It is fairly trivially traced on a transparent blockchain whereas cash is not.

Yes, it's a smaller problem to lose even all your ransom money, than to be physically captured and put in jail for decades. Can't we just agree on that?

Also "fairly trivially traced" can be naive. Here's one scenario from a million possible scenarios. You hate politician John Doe and happen to know me. I have a stash of millions in ransom money on my public anonymous wallet.

So I start sending money to organizations close to John Doe, and John Doe himself, implicating him in crime. You give me cash personally for a job well done. I just laundered some of my money and used the "trivial to trace" money against someone else.

Things aren't as simple as you may believe. Sure, if you're stupid and directly cash out your coin to your persona, you'll get traced and caught.

But money is money, it's a resource you can use in countless ways to move the pieces on the board around and get someone to pay you for it.

Here's another example. I start donating 100k USD worth of coin to bunch of charities. You may assume one of those is a pawn. But you can't prove who it is. Well, I happen to know one of the charity owners. I give him 30%, I just laundered 70k. I also lost some, but eh? I can blackmail some more people. Other people's money are cheap to me when I risk nothing by taking them.

Those are relatively simple schemes. If you sit down and think, you can come up with much better ones.

For example what I use this ransom money to pay for some other criminal activity? Like kill someone. I move the problem to them, but they can pass the ball around more until you can't prove WTF is happening. You have no idea whom those wallets belong to and why are there transactions happening. You can trace the money but you have no idea after some point if the recipient has any clue about the origin, or if there's criminal intent.

Here's another weakness. Who has worldwide authority over crime? No one. So if I shift my coin to the opposite side of the world and cash it there, due to fragmentation, lack of cooperation and so on, I may have cashed out before someone manages to even make the right calls to begin negotiations on cooperation.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#97

> 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.

El Salvador is using the lightning network to facilitate transactions for the most part. They are using the work of Strike & bitcoin beach in El Salvador as an example.

They are using them?

The country has a population of >6 million.

Bitcoin beach is a philanthropy run by one adult coordinator, 4 university students and 4 high school students.

The country is not using the lightning network. Maybe some have intentions for them to. But this is not something widely used by any means.

ref: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com/

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#98
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoiding the high fees of remittances when families send money to their loved ones back home.

People have always used Western Union, for which the charges are ten dollars or so, that's bearable. And, yes, they do have SMS banking in Salvador.

They can be a lot more than $10.

If everyone has and knows how to use Bitcoin then they can transfer as much as they like for <$1 ATM, and it'd be a much easier process.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#99

Congratulations to Bitcoin. All it took was a fascist takeover.

For the context, here are some Wikipedia articles about the 2020 and 2021 political crisis in El Salvador…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Salvadoran_political_cr...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Salvadoran_political_cr...

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#100
post #65
post #22

I 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.

This site sucks

Maybe before such an ad hominem you need to become a bit more familiar with recent developments in El salvador. Associating this government initiative with criminality is a very reasonable thing to do.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/05/06/el-salvado...

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