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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#491

Post by keymone »

chaostheory wrote: post #466
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.…

I'm not. Bitcoin has stagnated, and it hasn't delivered its promise of being used as a DeFi currency. I bet if it was Ethereum that El Salvador had chosen, the opinion wouldn't be as harsh. Proof of stake doesn't have the same energy consumption concerns. imo this is still a great development for all of crypto and DeFi. It will also help protect people who aren't connected and wealthy from losing their value due to e…

Proof of stake doesn’t use the energy because it doesn’t solve the problem that bitcoin solves.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#492

Post by keymone »

The level of ignorance on HN about how bitcoin works is staggering. Supposedly a forum of smart technologically savvy people completely missing the mark.

Bitcoin doesn’t use energy.

Bitcoin isn’t limited to 3 tps.

Bitcoin isn’t controlled by miners.

Bitcoin isn’t controlled by China.

Read and research a bit more before forming such strong opinions.

Edit: right, flag and downvote, what else can you do, it's not like you have a rational and defensible position anyway :D

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#493

Post by ChainOfFools »

rawtxapp wrote: post #446
ChainOfFools wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is centralization with extra steps.

How so?

the rise and consolidation of settlement channel aggregators is going to lead to another visa / Mastercard style duopoly, "but with blockchain."

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#494

Post by Kiro »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #477
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.…

I think a lot of the negativity comes from the fact that this is largely a forum of technologists, and Bitcoin is objectively inferior technology. That's not necessarily a knock against Bitcoin, it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but it was the 1.0 cryptocurrency and it's already essentially fossilized and become legacy technology. Miners hold sway over the community and they're not really interested in cha…

> The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin

And people only hate on it because they missed out. It doesn't matter how hard they try to justify the negativity with technological argument. Everyone still knows it's just jealousy speaking. I'm guilty of this and so are you.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#495

Post by bruce343434 »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #460
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.

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.

Still all sounds really complicated, obtuse and unnecessary. They should've went with a cryptocurrency which is actually usable out of the box as a... currency.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#496

Post by Blikkentrekker »

carloseduardov wrote: post #169
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.

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.

> I am salvadoran myself and I do not support the current president but [ ... ]

The word “but” implies some kind of contrast with what is to follow; there is none. Your support to lack thereof is orthogonal to the next point.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#498

Post by dang »

This has had quite a few discussions including a couple large ones:

Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27445119 - June 2021 (134 comments, ongoing)

El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27408683 - June 2021 (398 comments)

El Salvador Congress Approves Bitcoin As Legal Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27444718 - June 2021 (48 comments)

Bitcoin is a legal tender in El Salvador for all transactions and tax payments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27444400 - June 2021 (8 comments)

El Salvador Bitcoin legal tender is much bigger news than most realize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421705 - June 2021 (7 comments)

Bitcoin: El Salvador plans to make cryptocurrency legal tender - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27416409 - June 2021 (8 comments)

El Salvador to offer residence and no capital gains tax to Bitcoin investors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27416068 - June 2021 (6 comments)

El Salvador President: 1% of BTC invested would increase GDP by 25% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414667 - June 2021 (14 comments)

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I guess we'll leave this one up and then downweight follow-ups [1], unless significant new information [2] arises.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#499

Post by minsc__and__boo »

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.

Precisely.

Lightning scales with the number of transactions, but does not scale with the number of users. For that it still needs the bitcoin network to verify, and you're back at your transaction bottleneck but with added complexity.

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