Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 732 posts

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#571

Post by ankurpatel »

rawtxapp wrote: post #91
ankurpatel wrote: post #68

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.

Or, maybe just consider this, you are wrong and it ends up being very successful and more countries adopt it. For what it's worth, they have already been using Bitcoin in the El Zonte for some time now [1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...

My question to you is have you used it to buy anything real with it?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#572

Post by dcolkitt »

ar_lan wrote: post #508
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.

This is both true and not true. It is true that transactions on the blockchain is public. But it's not true that it makes it trivially easy to identify the actual entities behind those transactions.

The only thing that's actually public are the public keys of the transacting parties. Public keys can be anonymously generated for free. It only becomes possible to deanonymize transactions if the money actually touches a deanonymized terminus.

Even assuming all the fiat off-ramps are properly KYC'd, it still gives the criminal unilateral control to arbitrarily decide when and where to risk deanonymization. You can commit a crime, then wait years for the heat to let up and make sure you're in a safe country without extradition treaties.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#573

Post by la_fayette »

rspeele wrote: post #535
vmception wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The price of bitcoin determines how miners get paid, which determines how much energy they can (and rationally should) spend on mining. This news appears to have spiked the price of Bitcoin. Presumably, if El Salvador actually implements this policy and starts using Bitcoin that would also increase demand for Bitcoin and increase its price. Additionally, a full bitcoin block with high fees pays for more mining expend…

As they use lightning network the reasoning that there will be high demand for block space is not a valid assumption. Theoretically, it is possible that the government of el salvador is doing a single transaction on the blockchain as channel funding and sends bitcoin via lightning to 6,4 million people from el salvador from that channel without touching the blockchain...

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#574

Post by lend000 »

ddtaylor wrote: post #276
marcinjachymiak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning does work. I've used it myself as have many others. You should really work on explaining what it is you actually mean by that statement instead. Apparently they are using Lightning and a service LN Strike that recently launched. https://twitter.com/starkness/status/1402635954653904902?s=2...

LN requires an on-chain transaction for both opening and closing a channel and requires the node stays online 24/7 to receive payments. That's garbage.

Because Visa and other payment processors don't require opening an account? (e.g. a credit card, which is a much more involved process than opening a channel). Or 24 hour servers?

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#575

Post by fredfoobar »

bankisan wrote: post #558
fredfoobar wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "actual value" where is that value coming from?

I can walk down the street and buy a coffee with it.

We can do this soon in El Salvador (and some pockets in the US too).

The thing is, this is a strange argument, you want a sudden world wide adoption, like, tomorrow every biz owner wakes up and decides to accept bitcoin, so that you can buy your coffee at your local starbucks, have you thought through this? how does the total adoption happen what steps should happen before.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#576

Post by aeturnum »

ar_lan wrote: post #508
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.

I totally agree that Bitcoin should not be primarily identified with criminal activity.

However, I think it's very easy to understand where it started and why it generally isn't in bad faith. Digital currencies (of which Bitcoin is the largest and most well known) make certain types of crimes easier (drugs by mail, ransomware). Those crimes (as they are understood) always involve a digital currency so they feel new (even if they aren't in many ways). Most people don't pay attention to digital currencies so it's not surprising that they associate them with new behavior that doesn't seem possible without them.

I also suspect that, if you were to break down digital currency activity, that most exchanges of goods and services (as opposed to investments) do choose to use a digital currency because it evades some regulatory processes or laws. With the transaction cost of Bitcoin at over $4[1] (down from over $50 recently), I really doubt that people are using it for many exchanges of goods or services where its digital qualities don't enable the transaction in some way.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Edit: added a clarification about ransomware and drugs-by-mail. Ransomware and "darkweb markets" are based on older practices that, to an extent, are distinct because of digital currency. Corporate espionage and ransom demands are quite old, but we call generally call it "ransomware" when the extortion is based on holding digital assets and paying digitally as well.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#577

Post by fredfoobar »

mcbuilder wrote: post #567
fredfoobar wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "actual value" where is that value coming from?

Also stable value, if I stole $1 million, I'd probably want to bury it in the desert for a few years and then come back to dig it up once the heat died down. With BTC it's a big gamble what it will be worth. Fine to sit on it when the price is going up, but if the price of my ill gotten bitcoins is crashing it might force me to make a stupid mistake and get caught.

So, what you're talking about is a USD market consensus on another currency/entity (i.e. people who currently work with USD primarily arriving at a consensus on the price of bitcoin), run a simulation in your head if you will, something interesting and fairly complex comes up, there's a lot of information asymmetry around it, what do you think happens around the consensus of it as time progresses? (does the information asymmetry decrease or increase?)

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#578

Post by joshmarlow »

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…

> The primary beneficiaries of this will be organized crime

Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has some things to say about the use of BTC in crime:

> Based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated. • The blockchain ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded is an underutilized forensic tool that can be used more widely by law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify and disrupt illicit activities. Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool.

Source: https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitc...

There's also a strong (IMO) argument that energy-intensive crypto-mining can make renewable energy more competitive, by only mining when renewables are producing excess power. That lessens the problem of renewables creating excess energy (which can be damaging to power grids).

I'm not trying to downplay El Salvador's vulnerability to climate change. But actual solutions to climate change - or even just mitigating its effects - is going to require considerable capital and other resources. If using BTC gives El Salvador an economic advantage, then more power to them.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#579

Post by rawtxapp »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #564
rawtxapp wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make any sense, the channels are p2p, you can open and close channels with whoever you wish and your channel counterparties don't actually hold your funds, you hold them.

now you're making it sound like there's no need for channel aggregation at all. which is it?

I think we misunderstand each other, I'm talking about batching channel open/closes, I'm not talking about with whom you open channels.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#580

Post by MarkSweep »

marcinjachymiak wrote: post #545
zapdrive wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning is not decentralised. You have up keep your node online 24/7 to prevent theft. Most people can't do that. So they will end up keeping their coins in the custody of nodes that run 24/7. Leading to centralisation. Lightning is just like a MySQL database extra steps.

You don't have to be on exactly 24/7. The default delay for spending coins from a commitment txn is 144 blocks in some clients and is usually scaled with channel size. Most clients let you configure it manually too. That means you'd have to be online once within 24 hours of your counterparty trying to steal your channel balance to stop them. IMO this is pretty reasonable for a cellphone user. It doesn't follow that t…

So all anyone one needs to do to steal your money is DDoS you?
Post reply on HN