441–450 of 732 posts
I 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.
Are 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…
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If you run a node on lightning, you would know how much transactions you've forwarded, so you can make estimates, especially if you run a large node (say Bitfinex that runs their own nodes), but lightning isn't public the same way blockchain is. The 1MB block limit makes it highly likely that there will be transactions in the mempool, you still need to open/close channels (even batched ones) and presumably large tran…
> [I]t's very difficult to say what happens in year ~2140, we'll all be long gone by then I think it's more likely that at least one young person reading this news today will live to ~130 than Bitcoin making it that long.
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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…
> 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.
I am salvadoran myself and I do not support the current president but I should say that the law passed by congress says that El Salvador will have it's own bitcoin reserve and an exchange for bitcoin against USD (our current national currency), so there will NOT be a transaction fee involved as you are just moving within a national reserve with a national exchange.
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Channel factories will bundle channel open/closes into a single transaction significantly reducing the burden on the blockchain. LN adoption is growing very nicely (1ml.com), there are lots of wallets and users now.
this is centralization with extra steps.
This is going to be great for drug traffickers and other shady elements operating in El Salvador. What they did was just opening the door for the worst individuals to laundry money and buy assets in El Salvador.
This 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.
If that doesn't happen will you revise your opinion on bitcoin?
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…
"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 ..." This bitcoin to dollars confluence is even more interesting in the case of El Salvador where the US Dollar is the official currency . When you are in El Salvador you use actual, physical US Dollars for all cash transactions. This is not a de facto standard as in some other…
El Salvador has very strict cash regulations. Most transactions over $100 in cash require an ID. Even paying for a new laptop in cash would require you to fill a form stating source of income.
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Even without Lightning, it's not US$10 per transaction; I commented in more detail at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 .
Low on-chain fees are actually a disaster for Bitcoin. Once mining rewards dwindle to nothing due to halvings fees would have to rise astronomically to maintain hash power.
(Fees are a little more than 10% of miner's reward)