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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#321

Post by hiq »

StavrosK wrote: post #152
hiq wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/Rev…

> receiving money from N26 gets a 3 EUR fee again

If the payee has a Greek bank account I suppose? But then it means that if both payer and payee have a n26 bank account and use it in Greece, they don't have to pay this fee anymore, right? So why would they use Greek banks?

I just don't see how this 3 EUR fee still exists given the current competition.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#322

Post by crazypython »

zapdrive wrote: post #247
marcinjachymiak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning does work. I've used it myself as have many others. You should really work on explaining what it is you actually mean by that statement instead. Apparently they are using Lightning and a service LN Strike that recently launched. https://twitter.com/starkness/status/1402635954653904902?s=2...

Lightning is not decentralised. You have up keep your node online 24/7 to prevent theft. Most people can't do that. So they will end up keeping their coins in the custody of nodes that run 24/7. Leading to centralisation. Lightning is just like a MySQL database extra steps.

I read that you put a "bounty" in your transaction so that if your node is offline, another node will have an incentive to prevent the theft for you.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#323

Post by bhupy »

marcinjachymiak wrote: post #136
FreeTrade wrote: post #56

Sigh. 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…

Lightning does work. I've used it myself as have many others. You should really work on explaining what it is you actually mean by that statement instead. Apparently they are using Lightning and a service LN Strike that recently launched. https://twitter.com/starkness/status/1402635954653904902?s=2...

Are there any videos of Lightning in action in the real world (I.e. not abstract explainers)? Genuine question, I don’t know enough about it and would love to learn.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#324

Post by tangent128 »

dougSF70 wrote: post #161
systemvoltage wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that using cash makes money expensive which adds some base load inflation - this will help reduces homelessness and other societal ills (such as wealth inequality). Electronic money is never lost, not like those pounds, pennies, dollars, quarters. Losing money, takes out of circulation. While not much is taken out, it might be enough to create a base load of inflation - money becomes more scarce and therefore…

(I think your definitions are reversed- a decrease in money supply is associated with deflation, not inflation.)

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#326

Post by reedjosh »

wokwokwok wrote: post #252
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning network liquidity should actually help solve this. If you maintain a reserve and open a ton of payment channels for folks (those HTLCs are all on-chain), this drastically reduces impact of confirmation time and fees.

Should? Is that a speculation? Surely if they’re not doing this for the first time ever on an entire country? Someone has already used a large scale lightning network before right?

See El Zonte or Bitcoin Beach.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#327

Post by ulzeraj »

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I heard Strike and Bitcoin Beach Wallet use Lightning and that network makes the fees to drop bellow 1 cent.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#328

Post by dragonwriter »

jvanderbot wrote: post #303
ddtaylor wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LN requires opening and closing channels, each of which have to be done as a regular Bitcoin transaction. The value proposition of LN is that repeated transactions with the same entity (or some subset of) can be done without high fees, but considering almost nobody is currently using LN that doesn't change things right now.

That sounds fairly easy on a national exchange level, actually.

Unless the national exchange is hosting wallets it controls on behalf of individual citizens, or acting as an intermediary for all transactions—in which case you’ve negated all the features of Bitcoin and may as well be using any random currency with the government as shared banker—I don’t see how it does.

I mean, sure, “the government will be your bank for free” solves the problem of the unbanked, but renders the identity and features of the underlying currency mostly irrelevant.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#329

Post by StavrosK »

hiq wrote: post #321
StavrosK wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/Rev…

> receiving money from N26 gets a 3 EUR fee again If the payee has a Greek bank account I suppose? But then it means that if both payer and payee have a n26 bank account and use it in Greece, they don't have to pay this fee anymore, right? So why would they use Greek banks? I just don't see how this 3 EUR fee still exists given the current competition.

> If the payee has a Greek bank account I suppose? But then it means that if both payer and payee have a n26 bank account and use it in Greece, they don't have to pay this fee anymore, right? So why would they use Greek banks?

Indeed! I think Greek banks are just running on inertia now, they'll soon have to abolish these fees. One thing keeping people from switching was ATM usage (N26 only lets you withdraw for free up to some amount). This was especially since until a few years ago we were pretty much cash-only, but now that we're basically card-only, there's much less incentive to use an ATM.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#330

Post by reedjosh »

jwolfe wrote: post #244
bun_at_work wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bank does hold a fraction of your deposits, as our banking in the US is fractional reserve banking. This has been the case for quite some time, and isn't really the same thing as digital currency, even if we transact digitally.

From my understanding, they hold most of that in reserve accounts with the Federal Reserve. But yeah, someone at some point holds some cash. But of the total US money supply (in 2018), physical currency makes up about 11% of the total value[0]. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-us-currency-t...

And whenever this comes up, I just like to remind people that we went to a reserve requirement of 0% nearly a year ago with the start of COVID.

https://medium.com/navigating-life/we-just-went-from-fractio...

Edit: Downvoted, and I'm guessing it's the source? This is legitimate fact though. Here's the fed's own announcement.

> In light of the shift to an ample reserves regime, the Board has reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26, the beginning of the next reserve maintenance period. This action eliminates reserve requirements for thousands of depository institutions and will help to support lending to households and businesses.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

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