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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#501

Post by Kbelicius »

keymone wrote: post #490
dodobirdlord wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Inferior to what? It’s the first and arguably best technology that brought digital decentralized ownership to humanity. How is that not enough? Personally it seems all the negativity comes from people who don’t get it or those who are salty because they missed the boat.

> Inferior to what?

Not the GP but probably to crypto that followed it.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#502

Post by minsc__and__boo »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #493
rawtxapp wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

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

Yep, it's like lightning is moving closer and closer to credit cards, which was what blockchain was supposed to substitute.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#503

Post by vmception »

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…

An empty bitcoin block and a full bitcoin block use the same amount of energy

Use and El Salvador’s use has no influence on that

The hyperbole only marginalizes yourself

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#504

Post by madacol »

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.

If what you want is a more technical answer of how the balances in a LN channel is trustlessly updated, then you should probably read a more in-depth resource, it's a complicated topic. But I'll try to give you some idea.

Every transaction in a LN channel is not a simple transaction, it's a smart contract transaction that, if broadcasted, closes the channel automatically but have multiple ways of spending it further, and one of those ways allows a party to get all the funds if he has proof that the counter party cheated (closed the channel using and old-state transaction).

So those transactions that are created are never published if both party cooperate, instead, they serve as a forced-closing mechanism if the other party is uncooperative

That was just a high level view of updating channels, but opening a channel and routing a payment is another story

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#505

Post by lowkey »

captn3m0 wrote: post #176
scottmsul wrote: post #118

Haha as someone who listened to the entire Twitter spaces chat last night, it's amazing how ignorant HN is about what's actually happening on the ground in El Salvador.

I found this to be a good read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Salvadoran_political_cr...

To add color to the source you shared, no where in the article (or in my research) does anyone claim that what the majority elected Salvadoran government did here was illegal, only that their opposition didn’t like it and so called it a ‘coup’.

Based on my understanding the elected government was well within it’s rights to replace these judges under the constitution of the country. Also to echo the sister comment here, many of these judges were highly politically active oponents of the newly elected government.

Here is another good read if you want to understand the historical context in which El Salvador is operating [1]

In short, one of the primary reasons that El Salvador is in a difficult position financially and politically at all is the history of war crimes committed against them by foreign governments such as the United States.

In the 1980’s the US Government spent $1-2 million US dollars per day to fund a 12 year long proxy civil war to defend US imperial interests. This resulted in the US Government directly funding the training and recruitment of an army of child soldiers. The country is still dealing with the ramifications of this war today.

I see your claims that new El Salvador government is evil and raise you 1 US Government with a history of war crimes against the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#506

Post by Dzugaru »

vmception wrote: post #503
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…

An empty bitcoin block and a full bitcoin block use the same amount of energy Use and El Salvador’s use has no influence on that The hyperbole only marginalizes yourself

This argument is deeply flawed for an obvious reason. E.g. why do you vote if your vote is only one of a hundred million?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#507

Post by keymone »

Kbelicius wrote: post #501
keymone wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferior to what? It’s the first and arguably best technology that brought digital decentralized ownership to humanity. How is that not enough? Personally it seems all the negativity comes from people who don’t get it or those who are salty because they missed the boat.

> Inferior to what? Not the GP but probably to crypto that followed it.

well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level. lots of solutions that trade decentralization and independence for performance, lots of hype and marketing, lots of bells and whistles of questionable value, lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#508

Post by ar_lan »

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…

This weird meme that Bitcoin is so beneficial to criminal activity (especially in comparison with physical cash)... I don't know where it started, but I wish its completely bad-faith nature would die. Sure, the Silk Road started, but the feds have wised up on how to trace Bitcoin since then - it's fairly straight-forward given the public-nature of the blockchain.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#509

Post by psychlops »

RivieraKid wrote: post #212

Bitcoin will never be able to beat official currencies in developed countries in this important metric - short term inflation risk. People tend to forget this but no other asset is safer in the short-term than the dollar, euro, etc. Why? Because no other asset has a powerful central entity whose job is to prevent loss of value above the 2% inflation target.

Their job is to push the worth of their currency inexorably toward zero.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#510

Post by cowl »

rawtxapp wrote: post #363
cowl wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Bitcoin is so volatile. You deposit today let's say 10k of your USD and in one week if the market doesn't like the twits of the day you find yourself with half that.

That won't be the case forever, as the market cap gets larger and larger, the fluctuations get much smaller. I mean fiat currency and gold's value still fluctuate on a day to day basis, nothing is set in stone.

fiat currency does not drop 50% in one month and is not at the mercy of other countries. If US forbids all banks to execute trades in BTC like China did, BTC is dead.
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