El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender • Hacker News Board

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#451

Post by lolmm » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #428

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.

you dont use graphics card to mine bitcoin. You use ASIC

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#452

Post by acdha » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

G3rn0ti wrote: post #297

jokethrowaway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hap…

Well, the concept of holding cash and gold at home is easier than managing a private key. But as soon as you want your money to work i.e. earn interests or invest it, crypto currencies are easier to work with. I mean, you can literally deposit and earn interest by touching a button inside your Coinbase wallet, right now. Regarding your second argument: Change in the financial system does not happen by itself. You nee…

> But the government can’t really prevent you to meet a “dealer” cashing in/out on your cryptos.

If that “dealer” doesn’t report your transactions under KYC or either of you don’t pay taxes, you’ll get a hard reminder that governments can and routinely do prevent things like this. It’s especially risky to break those laws with cryptocurrencies because you’re leaving a full irrepudiable history of every transaction so when they bust your dealer they get _every_ transaction, not just the one that was caught, and that’s for everyone they’ve dealt with — and since those transactions are all by definition illegal, they have both grounds to investigate and an easy lever to pressure each person to turn in bigger players in exchange for leniency.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#453

Post by rorykoehler » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #431

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…

It is not hard to scale Bitcoin for millions of people for everyday transactions. You give people a custodial wallet and track the balances off-chain using a trusted third party. As long as a government is willing to allow such a service to legally operate: 1. You can easily support billions of bitcoin transactions a second since the transactions only change centralized database entries. 2. Users can send and receive…

Why bother with Bitcoin at all if you need a trusted third party? Crypto maximalists have let greed blind them from the initial mission of crypto.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#454

Post by delaaxe » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

warkdarrior wrote: post #437

javert wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bitcoin becomes the world currency, nation states can mine in order to protect the system. I think an equilibrium would be reached. For example, the US is probably OK with Russia having 10% of hash power if the US has 10%, and so on. However, that particular example may be unrealistic, because the US would probably choose poverty over accepting bitcoin.

> If bitcoin becomes the world currency, nation states can mine in order to protect the system. That sounds truly decentralized. /s

As long as there’s enough countries mining, it’s decentralized enough

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#455

Post by madacol » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

Tarq0n wrote: post #302

rawtxapp wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need a phone, that's it. Banking requires all the infrastructure, etc.

There's plenty of primarily-online banks. I haven't set foot in a brick and mortar bank in well over a decade.

primarily-online-banks are close to non existent in latinoamerica

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#456

Post by ryan29 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #354

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.

Before they can even pay $10 per transaction, they need to buy Bitcoins first. The problem of the unbanked isn’t that they don’t have access to financial services, it’s that they don’t have enough money. They live paycheck-to-check, if that. There’s no point in converting what little they have to Bitcoin and paying fees on the conversion, and then more fees when spending it.

It's fees all the way down. I'm not even joking. I wanted to buy an ENS domain last week, so I put $100 CAD into an exchange (~$80USD). I abandoned the attempt because, after the fees to transfer out of the exchange to a private wallet and the fees to actually make the transaction on the blockchain, I wasn't sure if I'd have enough money. That's $80 to buy something that's supposed to be $5. I couldn't even figure out how to figure out what the damn thing would actually cost in the end.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#457

Post by WanderPanda » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

doomroot wrote: post #374

UncleMeat wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 transactions a second is 100m transactions per year. So everybody on the planet gets one transaction per 70 years. So everybody gets one transaction in their lifetime to open a channel to a lightning network provider and that's it.

You can do far more than 3 tx per second in mainchain. Look into channel factories. 100s of trustless lightning network channels in 1 onchain transaction. Layer approach is the only viable scaling solution.

How does it work? Don’t you still need O(n) bytes for the payload?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#458

Post by rllearneratwork » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

carlosdp wrote: post #218

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 al…

of course crypto would not help criminal money laundering. Bitcoin and Etherium are very traceable by design. In fact, it is often much, much easier to trace to origin of Bitcoin funds than the origin of USD funds, especially when cash was involved. There are "private" coins like Monero but they aren't getting much traction.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#459

Post by aNoob7000 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

warkdarrior wrote: post #397

freeone3000 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's closer to each individual bank having their own digital currency, all of which are worth 1 USD each. The digital US dollars at my bank are not directly exchangable with the digital US dollars at your bank. You need to settle up with an ACH transaction, which takes at least a day to transact as it has to run in a central batch job. In addition, only US domestic institutions can use this mechanism to transfer US d…

> The digital US dollars at my bank are not directly exchangable with the digital US dollars at your bank. You need to settle up with an ACH transaction, which takes at least a day to transact as it has to run in a central batch job. FedNow will reduce that latency from days to minutes. US is slow in that game, but RTP is widely deployed in UK, France, etc. For international transactions, one can use SWIFT (days) or…

I want my digital cash to work like regular cash. I need to pay the lawn guy, send an iMessage. I wanna buy lunch, swipe my phone and pay with the money in my phone. I don't need the charge going through my bank or some intermediary.

I want freedom to use my digital money the way I want without someone holding my account hostage, if I do something wrong. Additionally, I have no problem losing my money, if I send the money to the wrong person or lose my phone.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#460

Post by thescriptkiddie » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #251

rawtxapp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

LN now has routing, so you can open a single channel with a well-connected node and transact with everyone. They will charge you a fee for this, but it is on the order of 1/100th as much as a regular bitcoin transaction.