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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#551

Post by loceng »

pinkybanana wrote: post #533
loceng wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile whoever donated it is seemingly furthering adoption of it helping solidify the unnecessary increasingly large wealth transfer from later adopters to earlier adopters - a promise where the money is only worth the artificial price if enough of society adopt it to allow early adopters to be made whole again without crashing the price..

So what. That guy helped the poor people, and helped himself even more. However on absolute terms, everyone involved is better off. If you are unhappy on how he did it, maybe you can donate your funds to poor people in a no-strings attached way. I don't see however why that would be much better for society.

He only helped the poor if the MLM-Ponzi scheme doesn't collapse and the poor aren't left holding the bag - which requires the remainder of society to be stupid enough to be the latest adopters, holding the bag, and then giving up a substantial amount of their buying power - in part because they're now competing with the extra money earlier adopters have because of the wealth transfer. Otherwise the poor then have transferred their actual money to earlier adopters who sold them the Bitcoin at an ungrounded-artificial price - which they're not going to get back and their Bitcoin then is arguably worthless, which it becomes when no one's willing to put more money in - or once there's a bank run and there aren't billions of USD in reserve from large institutions to try to counter a crash of future bank runs.

Also, the person, let's say they bought Bitcoin at $100 - and they gave it to them at $20,000 - then what they gave is 5% of that amount - and the full amount is actually realized/then paid for/"donated" by others; sure they potentially gave up 90% of the Bitcoin if they could have even realized a significant amount of that without influencing the price too much.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#552

Post by paulgb »

rawtxapp wrote: post #516
WanderPanda wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also only 2140 if you believe that the market cap can double with the halvening schedule every four years. I see the upper bound (around gold market cap) in 3-5 halving cycles. After that the majority of the security has to be financed by tx fees

I'm referring to block rewards, the miners will get block rewards until 2140, price of Bitcoin doesn't matter.

Miners will get an exponentially decreasing amount of block rewards until 2140, but even 20 years from now the (BTC-denominated) size of the block rewards will be substantially lower than they are today.

The price matters because they are BTC-denominated. If the price of Bitcoin doubles every 4 years, the security of the system can stay at parity with what it is today (assuming the real value of transaction fees stays roughly the same).

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#553

Post by minsc__and__boo »

pinkybanana wrote: post #533
loceng wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile whoever donated it is seemingly furthering adoption of it helping solidify the unnecessary increasingly large wealth transfer from later adopters to earlier adopters - a promise where the money is only worth the artificial price if enough of society adopt it to allow early adopters to be made whole again without crashing the price..

So what. That guy helped the poor people, and helped himself even more. However on absolute terms, everyone involved is better off. If you are unhappy on how he did it, maybe you can donate your funds to poor people in a no-strings attached way. I don't see however why that would be much better for society.

This is the same argument Facebook made for giving free internet to facebook.com but charging for every other website

There are hidden costs to economically disrupting developing economies even if it's "for the poor people". For facebook, it was decimating any local ISP growth by snatching their market. For this, there could be any other number of normal payment systems that are squashed even as this BTC patron moves on to pumping bitcoin elsewhere.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#555

Post by fredfoobar »

minsc__and__boo wrote: post #546
carlosdp wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero is pretty popular in Venezuela right now.

Monero is probably used more like a currency than BTC is.

Monero and other crypto folks seem to rush in whenever Bitcoin is being attacked for something. I find it fascinating.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#556

Post by lowkey »

captn3m0 wrote: post #528
lowkey wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 her…

There's statements from the EU,UN, and Human Rights Watch condemning the actions. I'm not an expert, but dismantling the justice system utterly (especially when it is critical to the government) isn't something to be taken lightly in any democracy.

I will admit that I don't know the reality on the ground as an outsider. However, it seems to me just as likely that this is a political struggle between the new government and their opponents.

As for the EU and the UN, these are the same orgs that supported the US/Canada/French/German/Italian 2011 War of aggression against the Libyan government, with the backing and support of the UN. Ostensibly it was in the name of taking down a dictator, but we now know it was for his crime of daring to try to build a pan-African currency (the gold-backed Dinar) that was not subject to the central banks.

I hear you claim that credible first world organizations (the United Nations!) condemned the action. (Please share those articles so I can review sources). However, given the track record of western colonial powers oppressing smaller and weaker governments, or invading them based on false pretexts, I find your unsourced claims to be dubious at best (Where are those WMDs in Iraq that the US and the EU claimed existed?)

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#557

Post by rspeele »

sabhiram wrote: post #547
Dzugaru wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's not how it works. This adoption has a massive impact on acceptance of Bitcoin. If we assume Bitcoin is a mistake for humanity - this clearly is a great wrongdoing. A smaller wrongdoing would be buying Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin or making positive comments about Bitcoin on HN. Sadly, all these are economically justified (for now).

Isn't it pretty awesome that as a bunch of environmental activists, we are ok with golf greens and almond exports? Ok with tankers which spill oil by the lake-full and intense deforestation? But when it comes to proof of work crypto - suddenly it's a veil of FUD? How can you find fault with someone trying to make more money? This is capitalism at work. Not saying the energy argument for crypto is moot, but it is cert…

Many things in the world use a lot of energy, even inefficiently.

But it's hard for me to think of another thing that makes a worldwide competition for who can waste the most energy, with a massive crowdfunded prize every 10 minutes, and the crowd that has paid into the system to fund the prizes so far wants me to join in funding it so the prize can get bigger.

Edit: for example, take Cathie Wood's claim that Bitcoin will be worth $500,000. If that happens before 2024, that would make the reward for the winner of the useless-hashing race $3.1 million plus change, every 10 minutes. Awesome!!! That kind of money can buy a lot of useless-hashing ASICs and energy to run them. The smart miner had better spend most of it that way, just to be able to keep up with the others in the race.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#560

Post by minsc__and__boo »

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.

With Lightning channel factories:

- 2 people can make 10,000,000 transactions between each other in seconds

- 10,000,000 people can make 2 transactions between each other in 46 days

Channel factories are not a solution to the user scaling problem.

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