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

621–630 of 732 posts

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#621

Post by deschutes »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #86

"Bitcoin is positioned to disrupt the remittances industry in El Salvador, estimated at about $5 billion annually. Most families in towns like El Zonte do not have bank accounts, and rely on services such as Western Union WU +0.5%, which take 5-10% in fees. The closest Western Union is approximately one hour by bus, requiring the recipient of the cash transfer to take the bus back with cash on hand, creating a safety…

According to the article, the town didn't even want to use Bitcoin. An anonymous donor gifted them a large amount of Bitcoin on the condition that they must learn how to use Bitcoin and advocate for the use of Bitcoin: > After meeting with several philanthropies in the region, all of which wanted to take the funds and convert them into fiat to cover the community's immediate needs, the donor partnered with Michael Pe…

It's evil.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#622

Post by Growling_owl »

minsc__and__boo wrote: post #553
pinkybanana wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For facebook, it was decimating any local ISP growth by snatching their market

When the hated big guys move, there is always the suspect that somehow, somewhere, somebody else could have done it better, or with less externalities or with less publicity or with less branding or in a way that it's local.

It's not the act itself which troubles people. People will always find a way to hate on Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin or Gates.

Now that Netscape went belly up everybody suddenly imagines a world where if only Microsoft was broken up then we'd all live in a Jetsons type future with flying cars and tubes carrying us around, all thanks to Netscape

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#623

Post by HWR_14 »

reedjosh wrote: post #385
eloff wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Latin America people kidnap you and take you around to ATMs at gunpoint until you've reached the withdrawal limit. This seems so much more dangerous with bitcoin wallets.

There are wallets that will show a fake lower balance in distress mode. Further, why walk around with all of your BTC available to you? If you really have enough to worry about gangs stealing it, put it in cold storage or on an exchange, but don't carry access to it around in your pocket the same way you wouldn't carry cash around in your pocket.

A fake UI screen? Wow, that's useful. Good thing there isn't an easily verifiable public ledger with the true value of the account that the criminals can check while holding you at gunpoint.

Meanwhile, you expect people to have cold storage where? IIRC, they cannot just memorize a private key, but they need an actual file on a device.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#624

Post by Kbelicius »

keymone wrote: post #507
Kbelicius wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level.

This is also a statement that need clarifying. What do you even mean when you say "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.

All of this can be said about btc too. Except the part about trading decentralization and independence for performance. Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#625

Post by haskellandchill »

Kiro wrote: post #494
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…

> 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.

You are blinded by greed. Not everyone thinks that way. Some of us care for things in dimensions orthogonal to money.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#626

Post by navd »

loceng wrote: post #482
slim wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems legit to me. It worked. There was no reason for them to want to cash out apart from resistance to change.

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..

This is all currency though. The difference is that if you adopted Bitcoin you wouldn’t get poorer as time went on.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#627

Post by acdha »

crazypython wrote: post #614
acdha wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is open market competition for these third-parties. Like banks? > The system is fully trustless Except for those third-parties, you mean? The people running the Lightning network are essential to this system functioning and very, very few people won’t be fully reliant on a bank to store their Bitcoin — especially after the first time someone makes the news for losing their wallet.

> Except for those third-parties, you mean? The third-party can't steal your Bitcoins. Assuming your node is online 24/7, you can verifiably cash out your Bitcoin on the blockchain at any time. The third-party doesn't hold your Bitcoin– both parties can close the channel and cash out, again without any trust. Your Bitcoins can't be stolen by a third-party, unless you and your watchtower fail to broadcast a transactio…

That sounds like a lot of infrastructure which you need to operate to avoid trusting your back. Do we have any reason to think the average Salvadoran wants to do that? If not, it’s not exactly realizing the sales pitch.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#628

Post by sorbits »

kragen wrote: post #599
sorbits wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point where I live here in Argentina Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter? And in the case of El Salvador, I think Western Union is popular for remittance because people without a bank account can get cash. Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a…

> Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter? The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391 I can't get an Argentine bank account, and you need a bank account to use either Tra…

> The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't.

The comment you link to say that you cannot get money out of Argentina (due to capital controls).

Fair enough, but in the comment I replied to, you said that you were living in Argentina, and got paid in bitcoin.

Am I to infer that you want to get your salary out of Argentina? And those who pay you are within Argentina?

Otherwise, I do not see the problem.

If you are paid by someone outside Argentina, they can deposit the money (as USD or whatever) into your PayPal or Wise account, and you can send them to whoever you want, get a debit card associated with the account, and spend/withdraw within Argentina (without needing a local bank account).

I do understand that bitcoin is a means to get money out of a country with capital controls, but normally money flows into these countries, as has been mentioned earlier, 20% of El Salvador’s BNP is remittance, i.e. people are sending money into the country.

>> Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a bank account”. > This is not correct. It does

Bitcoin itself does not solve it. But I assume that you have found people in Argentina, who are willing to pay you cash for bitcoins?

I wonder if people are willing to buy your bitcoins (with cash) because they see it as an investment, or because they need to transfer their cash out of Argentina and cannot go through the regular system (due to capital controls).

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#629

Post by fredfoobar »

rllearneratwork wrote: post #602
minsc__and__boo wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a monero folk and think it has no real world application outside of criminal dealings. Monero is being used as a currency though which is relevant because bitcoin used to be used as a currency too before the first bubble/speculators got a hold of it. It's critical to any conversation with claims about bitcoin being a great currency (it's not)

I am of an opinion that deflationary crypto (like Bitcoin) can not be used as currency. It should absolutely be used as a store of value (kind of like gold) and as a way to transfer value. ETH is not deflationary and it is a good candidate to be used as currency.

> ETH is not deflationary and it is a good candidate to be used as currency.

I'm guessing you're opposing EIP1559 then

Post reply on HN