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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#211

Post by HWR_14 »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #72
enlyth wrote: 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 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

Hasn't this already happened. It's called Zelle or Venmo or CashApp or ApplePay or a million others. Heck, if you prefer Elon Musk pushed technology there's even this thing called PayPal.

And it comes with a whole series of laws that protect you in the case of hacking, fraud, etc.

I don't follow the advantage of using a government-issued (and custodially held) bitcoin wallet. Well, I understand that El Salvador wants to encourage people to use their BTC there. But other than that I don't see the value.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#212

Post by RivieraKid »

Bitcoin will never be able to beat official currencies in developed countries in this important metric - short term inflation risk.

People tend to forget this but no other asset is safer in the short-term than the dollar, euro, etc. Why? Because no other asset has a powerful central entity whose job is to prevent loss of value above the 2% inflation target.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#213

Post by mumblemumble »

One angle I haven't seen explored much yet: This move will mean that people are legally required to use bitcoin, whether they're prepared to or not.

How does this work out for individuals running small businesses, who may not have the technical expertise to adapt well to Bitcoin? I fear they're quickly going to become the targets of phishing attacks.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#214

Post by jokethrowaway »

janeroe wrote: post #164
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The idea that "normal people" will be able to use bitcoin at all ... is laughable. The idea that "normal people" will be able to use cash at all is laughable. The idea that "normal people" will be able to use gold coins at all is laughable. And yet, many use (or used to) and don't need a mommy state to tell them what to do.

I'm all for getting the government out - but cash or gold is way easier to use.

If you have a political problem, you need to solve it politically. You can't hack it with a technical solution or politicians and their rich friends will just find a way to use it against you (like it's happening with btc, enjoy limitless tracking and the rich elite profiting from btc as much (if not more) than you) or ban it (like it happened to e-gold).

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#215

Post by rawtxapp »

blocked_again wrote: post #199
rawtxapp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using lightning network which allows almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments.

Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent that from happening and why can't one use a smiliar approach for the actual bitcoin blockchain?

The blockchain settles the transaction and records the finality.

Imagine a transaction as being a simple cryptographic signed message that sends 1 BTC to someone, you just broadcast it to the network and it gets recorded immediately. But if you expect to continue transacting with the same person, instead of broadcasting the transaction, you can hold on to it and keep iterating on top of it with new balances, each time signing the transaction so that your counterparty can always go to blockchain to claim their coins.

There's obviously some mechanism to avoid broadcasting old state and making sure you actually have the funds, etc, but you can't flood the network, even if you tried, you'd only be flooding your immediate neighbor which still charges fees, but much smaller fees than the blockchain. There's also mechanism for connecting those channels, so you don't need to have a direct channel with someone you want to pay, you just need a path to them.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#216

Post by nepthar »

blocked_again wrote: post #199
rawtxapp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using lightning network which allows almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments.

Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent that from happening and why can't one use a smiliar approach for the actual bitcoin blockchain?

High level answer: Lightning transactions happen off network and only "sync up" once in a while. In a lightning transaction, only the two individuals transacting know that it has happened. But in an on-chain transaction, that info is public.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#217

Post by scotty79 »

blocked_again wrote: post #199
rawtxapp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using lightning network which allows almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments.

Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent that from happening and why can't one use a smiliar approach for the actual bitcoin blockchain?

It's mostly to provide miners incentive to mine beyond periodically halved builtin reward for mining a block.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#218

Post by carlosdp »

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…

There was a quote recently from a high ranking former FBI agent that worked on money laundering where she said she wasn't really concerned about crypto making money laundering worse (trying to find the article again).

Her reasoning was: "what people need to understand is, 95% of money laundering with fiat currency already succeeds today without getting caught."

In other words, this won't really change much, it was already really hard to catch money laundering.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#220

Post by JKCalhoun »

systemvoltage wrote: post #92
aNoob7000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand.

For perhaps the same reasons as you, I decline/turn-off auto-pay of any services I subscribe to. I actually cut checks every couple of weeks to pay bills.

I need a regular reminder of how I am being nickeled and dimed. My big fear is a constant drain on my account from a service that I had forgotten about or just the accumulative damage a lot of services add up to.

To be sure, our corporate overlords love the auto-pay, cashless society they have created for our convenience.

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