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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#121

Post by kspacewalk2 »

angry_octet wrote: post #79

Amazingly shortsighted. The primary beneficiaries of this will be organised crime, who will now be able to wash the Bitcoin via El Salvador to convert it to dollars, which they can use to buy trade items and export the profits. The number one export of El Salvador is actually people. If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from O…

El Salvador has (and will have) negligible impact on both generation of and popularity of cryptocurrency, so I don't think that argument is very important given the far more pressing matters they have to deal with as a country, and ones they have control over.

The point about opening up a bank is interesting though. The amount of money WU is skimming off the top must be a non-negligible percentage of the country's GDP. There's gotta be a less pie-in-the-sky way to disrupt that without making El Salvador a money laundering haven, which will absolutely happen with this idea.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#122

Post by BTCOG »

blocked_again wrote: post #18

> 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.

They are using Zap/Strike (Lightning) and zero fees.

The phony "fees are $1,000 a tx line" and $10 hyperbole simply show you have no clue what you're talking about when speaking about Bitcoin. Even on chain the past solid week you could send free BTC transactions, or for a couple of cents.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#124

Post by acdha »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #63
spottybanana wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the normal people will use in the beginning is going to be non-custodial LN based solution like strike. Minimal fees, easy to use. If you get a bit more, move to custodial LN wallet/onchain transactions. More fees, more security and less trust. And once you have too much BTC start storing them in an offline cold storage.

The idea that "normal people" will be able to use bitcoin at all without getting their private keys stolen is laughable. Think of how often online bank accounts get hacked in the US, except the difference now is that your money is gone, permanently.

… and the people who made that possible for the hacker will laugh at you and say it's your fault rather than admitting that the system they sold you is fragile.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#125

Post by hmoy »

nemo1618 wrote: post #114

Regardless of your feelings about Bitcoin, it was really exciting to see the president of El Salvador himself pop into a Twitter Space last night, as the bill was being voted on , to chat with bitcoiners about the implications of the new law. This is exactly the appeal of Twitter, if you think about it: it's a kind of "direct democracy" where the leader of a country can chat casually with everyday people -- and not i…

He could likely be on the Space knowing comfortably that the bill would pass. Because otherwise, he'd send the army in again.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#126

Post by rawtxapp »

pengwing wrote: post #103

So how does paying in BTC via Lightning actually work? What kind of integration will store owners in El Salvador have to make within the next 90 days? Does this apply to buying a can of soda at a brick and mortar?

There's a bunch of open source payment processors they can use [1], BTCPay is my favorite. I think strike and a bunch of other Bitcoiners are helping them.

1: https://lightningnetworkstores.com/services

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#127

Post by pinkybanana »

angry_octet wrote: post #79

Amazingly shortsighted. The primary beneficiaries of this will be organised crime, who will now be able to wash the Bitcoin via El Salvador to convert it to dollars, which they can use to buy trade items and export the profits. The number one export of El Salvador is actually people. If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from O…

> If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from OCGs and Western Union / Money Gram etc.

Can you elaborate? With remittance there is people with physical cash in tens of different local currencies and countries, and they need to transfer that value to some other (obscure) country. I don't see any scenario how "just set up a bank in the US" is going anywhere near in fixing that problem.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#128

Post by hiq »

StavrosK wrote: post #60
kwhitefoot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live ordinary bank transactions are free for ordinary consumers. I never pay a transaction fee or any annual fees. My bank used to charge an annual fee for a credit card but they have stopped charging now. In fact in my whole life (I'm 65 so about 50 years of having bank accounts) I have never paid transaction fees for ordinary transactions (in the UK and Norway).

Greece here, transactions cost 3 EUR. I think they're possibly free if you use the same bank, but the apps are cumbersome to use and the potential for fees is a deterrent, so nobody uses them for transactions of less than hundreds of EUR.

> Greece here, transactions cost 3 EUR.

You mean that a transfer from your Greek bank account to another Greek bank account would cost you 3 EUR?

What happens if you get a bank account in another EU / SEPA country (e.g. via n26) and use it instead of a Greek bank account? Would there be any downside? Would a Greek company paying you a salary refuse to transfer the money there rather than a Greek bank account?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#129

Post by runbathtime »

Does anyone know how the Strike app works? They say they use bitcoin to move usd to usd? Strike is the partner with the El Salvador gov that will help convert bitcoin to usd for any merchant who doesn't want the bitcoin. Merchants will be forced to accept bitcoin for payment for goods and services, and the government will basically subsidize the transaction (a huge tax on its people for the benefit of bitcoiners).
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