Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 732 posts

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#411

Post by hypnotist »

ausbah wrote: post #387
hypnotist wrote: post #367

I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance. Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails.…

by comparing it to Linux do you mean where the backbone of finance is run by Bitcoin (like Linux running servers), or where <1% of users directly use Bitcoin themselves?

well, Linux is hugely successful open source project. Virtually everyone is "touched" by it directly or indirectly. It is one of core components of internet infrastructure. Bitcoin could be that.

(of course I am aware that desktop/direct usage is really small)

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#412

Post by jerry1979 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #155
throwkeep wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

They may also have picked bitcoin because of its liquidity and its stable techno-social scaffolding.

Also, I assume that users will have the option to move funds from Strike into a hardware wallet (or similar) of their choosing. Either way, if El Salvadorans get in on the ground of floor of the state adoption phase of bitcoin, they are gonna make bank.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#413

Post by admax88q »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #380
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.

So "off chain" means LN holds the BTC in some other data structure then batches it up as one big transaction? Kinda like how a broker covers small retail trades until they hit enough volume to register an NYSE trade on the floor? Is that how it works? If so , this means lots of BTC is tied up in LN ... that seems dubious as heck.

Sort of.

It's not entirely off chain. It's hedged in that a transaction is created sending X BTC between us, we repeatedly update that transaction off chain every time we move small amounts of money between eachother, then after Y days we submit the final transaction to the blockchain to resolve the total amounts.

The idea being if one of us starts to be uncooperative, the other can just submit the transaction at its latest state so that we don't lose anything except that last update that we disagreed upon.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#414

Post by slim »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #86

"Bitcoin is positioned to disrupt the remittances industry in El Salvador, estimated at about $5 billion annually. Most families in towns like El Zonte do not have bank accounts, and rely on services such as Western Union WU +0.5%, which take 5-10% in fees. The closest Western Union is approximately one hour by bus, requiring the recipient of the cash transfer to take the bus back with cash on hand, creating a safety…

According to the article, the town didn't even want to use Bitcoin. An anonymous donor gifted them a large amount of Bitcoin on the condition that they must learn how to use Bitcoin and advocate for the use of Bitcoin: > After meeting with several philanthropies in the region, all of which wanted to take the funds and convert them into fiat to cover the community's immediate needs, the donor partnered with Michael Pe…

Seems legit to me. It worked. There was no reason for them to want to cash out apart from resistance to change.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#415

Post by pavlov »

ddvvff wrote: post #377
pavlov wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This president of El Salvador sent soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to coerce the parliament to vote in his favor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Salvadoran_political_cris... He is not a friend of democracy, except the performative "chatting with laser-eyed crypto stans on Twitter" kind.

Sorry if this is not on your sensibilities, but that assembly was very corrupt so much so that people wanted them out as soon as possible, he did not command the military to do what they did, the military showed up in support for the people who were also there. He has 90% approval rate on the opposition owned polls, and he has supermajority of the assembly for a reason, 30 years of pure corruption without any consequ…

These are the same arguments people used to defend Hugo Chávez back in the day. He’s very popular, the military loves him, other politicians are so corrupt, he’s just doing what he has to do in face of American imperialist manipulation, etc.

They are both tapping the same deep vein of authoritarian populism, although nominally at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#416

Post by ashtonkem »

brianobush wrote: post #319
wokwokwok wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Six million is not a huge country. The current lighting network can handle millions of transactions per second.

That’s been the claim for a while, yes. But actually delivery of said promises has always been “soon”.

And while six million isn’t a huge country comparatively, I personally would be mighty pissed off if my entire country was used as a massive financial experiment for crypto enthusiasts.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#417

Post by reedjosh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #328
jvanderbot wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Except the main benefit of BTC is really the lack of printability. Governments can't just make more of it even if they run the LN for their country. That said I don't think it will come to full LN centralization either.

There are still other cryptos that have further benefits as well.

Monero for example is fully private and can do ~1500tps on chain atm. Bitcoin adoption is just one avenue to competing currencies that bring freedom back. If the LN can remain distributed and bring anonymity to its users, then great, but if not there's still further alternatives, and with decentralized exchanges, governments won't be able to stop the use of a better system.

Currency competition is just plain great for human rights and freedom.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#418

Post by beambot »

ausbah wrote: post #387
hypnotist wrote: post #367

I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance. Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails.…

by comparing it to Linux do you mean where the backbone of finance is run by Bitcoin (like Linux running servers), or where <1% of users directly use Bitcoin themselves?

Linux's Unix predecessor originated in the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s. It's almost 50 years old at this point. It didn't even get POSIX compliance until the 1980s, and it was 20-25 years old (2x BTC) when Linus got around to building the Linux kernel.

Bitcoin (and blockchain generally) is only 12 years old. Time will tell how well this comment ages... but it's a bit unfair to compare the two directly at their respective ages.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#419

Post by warkdarrior »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #370
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dollar is a central bank currency The term "dollar" encompasses central bank money (including but not limited to banknotes) as well as private money. > Numbers in a retail bank's ledger are not digital dollars Yes, they very much are. Modern money creation is public-private and only semi-centralized.

This is correct in practice. But consider what I said in the context of the discussion: contrasting 'digital dollars' with cryptocurrencies. With dollars, individuals have to choose between bank accounts, which are subject to counterparty risk, and cash, which cannot be transacted digitally. If your holding of 'digital dollars' in a bank account is subject to counterparty risk, then there's something different about…

> With cryptocurrency, anyone can transact the real thing. There's no counterparty risk.

This only holds true if there was only one cryptocurrency in the world and everyone used self-custody. As soon as you have multiple cryptocurrencies and multiple networks and multiple wallet providers, you have counterparty risk.

Coinbase may not disappear, but others may. Similar for Bitcoin etc. etc.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#420

Post by birthday »

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…

Let's take drug money as an example - the solution here is to legalize and control substances, not criminalize them and then ban something totally unrelated (blockchain technology). This is patching a symptom rather than fixing the root cause which never works out.

And most importantly, withholding blockchain technology is not a solution to money laundering - it is happening already with legacy systems.

Fixing money laundering is not the priority here - we can look at fixing this later in our journey.

Post reply on HN