Haha as someone who listened to the entire Twitter spaces chat last night, it's amazing how ignorant HN is about what's actually happening on the ground in El Salvador.
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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> You mean that a transfer from your Greek bank account to another Greek bank account would cost you 3 EUR?
Yep! Sad.
> 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?
No, transferring money to N26/Revolut is free (well, minus whatever fee the Greek bank will charge, which I think will be 3 EUR), but receiving money from N26 gets a 3 EUR fee again...
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#153Sigh. Bitcoin BTC, at 3 transactions per second, doesn't have the capacity to support El Salvador's economy. Even if Lightning worked (it doesn't), BTC doesn't have enough capacity to open channels for users at a reasonable cost. Salvadorians will end up forced to use proprietary payment networks denominated in BTC. BTC is not cash anymore, it won't work as such. There are other cryptos that could work, we'll have to…
They're literally using Lightning for payments right now in El Salvador. They didn't do this without having local projects already. Bitcoin Beach ( https://twitter.com/Bitcoinbeach ) made a lot of this happen.
The cost and complexity of opening channels for users is prohibitive. Any widely adopted solutions will therefore be custodial. Might as well use PayPal.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#154What are the chances the President of El Salvador was paid off by Coinbase or the like?
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#155I 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.
They're using Strike, which has no fees, nearly instant transfers, can send globally (again for free) and only need a name and phone number. Isn't that better than a bank aside from clawbacks? https://strike.me/
But you see that's the problem. With Strike you aren't tranasacting on the Blockchain, you're transacting through Strike which I then would settle the transaction for you. Yes it has the advantage of no fees, instant transfers, etc. But you aren't really transacting on the blockchain, at least not directly.
El Salvador picked BTC because of it's popularity, the problem is BTC is a terrible currency to actually use for something like this because of slow transaction speeds and high fees, so to get around that they augment it with Stike, which takes the decentralization out of the transactions, which makes the whole thing moot in my mind.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#156This represents yet another valuable opportunity for crypto skeptics to set up falsifiable measure to check their skepticism against, but I'm afraid most won't bother going through the exercise.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#157Earlier 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.
The digital dollar has been here for years. I couldn't even tell you the last time I carried paper currency.
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#158Are 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 i…
Do you have to pay CGT in Japan?
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're literally using Lightning for payments right now in El Salvador. They didn't do this without having local projects already. Bitcoin Beach ( https://twitter.com/Bitcoinbeach ) made a lot of this happen.
The cost and complexity of opening channels for users is prohibitive. Any widely adopted solutions will therefore be custodial. Might as well use PayPal.
There are easy to use non-custodial wallets (try Phoenix wallet).
Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
#160This 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.
I'd suggest you write down on a piece of paper a measurable fact that would disprove your hypothesis. (The hypothesis you write down here as if it were a fact.)