El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender • Hacker News Board

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#421

Post by random_kris » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

eeegnu wrote: post #295

nepthar wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What prevents someone from making the transaction on the lightning network, as well as the btc blockchain before the lightning network syncs up?

Other person node who would lose money if this happend can publish the original transaction that is construscted in a way that the attacker would lose all his funds.

So attacker could potentially do this but if they get caught they get punished for losing everything and they get caught if the other side node is online when this happens. There are also watchtowers that can monitor the network for hacks like this

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#422

Post by svachalek » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

Just like paying "Mastercard dollars" at the store means it might as well be pesos? Presumably for transactions that are worth paying blockchain fees, you'd use the blockchain.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#423

Post by yuvadam » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #312

TimJRobinson wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

Bitcoin beach is run by a few college students. Not exactly something to depend on.

Funny saying that on HN.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#424

Post by ddvvff » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #415

ddvvff wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

El Salvador is not Venezuela as much as you'd like to think we're all the same, it's a totally different political landscape, we had a civil war where 80k people died in a cold war proxy and the guerrillas were consolidated into FMLN and death squad members formed ARENA, nowhere else in Latin America did a communist/capitalist conflict had this outcome, guerillas never became a party anywhere else as a means to end the war, all these deaths, for the very same people who formed political parties and for what?

Endless corruption when they got to power, we're sick of it.

check how the former ARENA candidate for presidency Javier Siman, who's also a high ranking member of ANEP and ARENA's party leader lobbies in the US for support of his own interests, it's not a secret except for the vast majority of people in El Salvador who are not educated enough to research on that, oh btw, who didn't prioritize education for 30 years? You guessed it ARENA and FMLN,

you might call giving most kids in school a populist move by Bukele, but he's actually closing a technological gap by doing that.

Wanna know how FMLN handled tech? Like this: https://youtu.be/FVxkvnWek-0

> What's your twitter president?

> It's twit-twitter dot com heh, that's the party one right? Eeh

A disgrace

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#425

Post by RiverStone » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #304

I think it's interesting that people are still harping on the transaction fees. It's a fair point, but I don't honestly think that most people who've studied Bitcoin for more than a minute wants to use it for transactions. More and more people are seeing Bitcoin as either a store of wealth or a money making scheme. In either of those cases, the transaction fees really don't matter as much. Incessantly bringing up the…

People bring it up because BTC evangelists keep arguing that bitcoin is a game changer for remittances, the unbanked, transactions, etc.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#426

Post by ryan29 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

allo37 wrote: post #64

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).

Where I live (Canada), transactions are usually "free" up to a certain amount per month, but they often hit you with monthly fees. That is unless you can maintain a minimum balance in your bank account, in which case the fees become the interest they earn off that chunk of cash, I suppose.

I'm in Canada too and a couple years ago my regular bank sent me a notice saying they needed to increase my fees on my account plan by $1 making it a total of $16 per month IIRC. I already thought $15 was a total ripoff and trying to squeeze the extra $1 a month out of me got me annoyed enough to go looking for alternatives.

I got a free Tangerine account for free unlimited debit transactions. As a bonus I can withdraw cash with no fees at Scotiabank ATMs in addition to my normal bank. They also give you a VISA debit card that can be useful as a backup card for important online services (as long as you keep some money in it).

I also got a free (prepaid) Stack Mastercard. They give you a virtual credit card number you can use online plus a physical card. The main benefit though is 0% (or near 0%) foreign exchange fees. Most online services bill in USD and my normal bank charges around 2% extra in fees for the foreign currency conversion.

Then I reduced my normal bank account to the bare minimum $4 per month plan. So instead of squeezing an extra $12 per year from me, my bank gets $132 less per year now. However, that shows you why it works. Even if 9% of their customers do what I did they still make more money and I'd bet a ton that barely anyone reevaluates their banking because of a $1 per month increase in prices.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#427

Post by rahimnathwani » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

warkdarrior wrote: post #419

rahimnathwani wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "if ... everyone used self-custody"

I said 'anyone can', not 'everyone does'.

> "disappear, but others may. Similar for Bitcoin"

The risk of the bitcoin blockchain disappearing, and your BTC holdings thereby becoming worthless, is not an instance of counterparty risk.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#428

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

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.…

If BTC used proof-of-stake or some other scheme that was less energy-intensive/made graphics cards a scarce resource there would probably be less hostility towards it.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#429

Post by andyana » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

reedjosh wrote: post #362

KingOfCoders wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More UX will develop over time as adoption grows. We already have hardware wallets that even babies could use." The difference is this: If people have a hardware wallet they use digitally they think it's like a bank account on their phone. They do not realize that with that wallet if the wallet is gone so is the money. Wheras if the phone is gone, nothing happens to their money.

Have a wallet and a seed phrase for said wallet in a safety deposit box or even two. Boom, all set.

You mean a safety deposit box at a bank? At a bank most Ecuadorians don't use?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#430

Post by lftl » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

thinkmassive wrote: post #406

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

Multisig solutions are available for increased security and reliability. Services like Casa and Unchained Capital will even hold a single key from your set, allowing you to recover your funds if one of your keys is lost, however they can never move your funds on their own because they never possess a quorum.

How does it work that they have the ability to help you recover your funds, but they can't do that "recovery" unilaterally?