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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

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Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#641

Post by mudlus »

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…

Keyword is "immediate needs," another community that only focused on "immediate needs"? Easter Island.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#642

Post by keymone »

Kbelicius wrote: post #624
keymone wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-p…

> What do you even mean when you say "on fundamental level"?

Fundamental properties of bitcoin are its decentralization and security achieved via and expressed in, very transparently and using very simple formula, in terms of energy expenditure, tying it unambiguously to the real world physics.

No other project has such properties or comes close to the level to which those properties are achieved in bitcoin.

> All of this can be said about btc too.

Nope.

> Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.

Only if you don’t understand what performance of a cryptocurrency is, or what decentralization of cryptocurrency means. And independence is from marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans that crypto world is full of.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#643

Post by viraptor »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #167
viraptor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WU fees are likely so high because they can be. If there's no competition, why not rake profits? I'm curious what the fees will be in a few weeks.

If you are the only financial service for a large population, why not take them for all they're worth?

Because you push the government to legislate an alternative on an immediate country-wide level. At their scale they could've been taking smaller profit for many years without poking the bear.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#644

Post by philihp »

deschutes wrote: post #621
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just wait until you hear about how we give money to low income families on the condition that they don't cash it out for alcohol and tobacco.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#645

Post by bubersson »

liquidify wrote: post #309

Is bitcoin specifically legal tender, or other digital currencies, or layer 2 solutions, or what exactly? If bitcoin only was made legal tender, then layer 2 solutions will not be legal tender, and businesses could choose to only accept direct bitcoin payments via the blockchain, forcing customers to pay high fees.

Then maybe as a customer I would buy from the seller that doesn't have the high fees. As soon as one business chooses to use the "cheaper and faster" option, then all other businesses sort of have to too, unless they want to be out of business.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#646

Post by Tarq0n »

madacol wrote: post #455
Tarq0n wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of primarily-online banks. I haven't set foot in a brick and mortar bank in well over a decade.

primarily-online-banks are close to non existent in latinoamerica

I don't see why developing a sophisticated mobile bitcoin payment platform would be any easier.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#647

Post by rllearneratwork »

fredfoobar wrote: post #629
rllearneratwork wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am fine with EIP1559. If ETH becomes deflationary, it would still have other uses and something else can fill in the "currency" use.

Intuitively (have no idea how to do this), it would be interesting to have Country's coin supply grow (approx.) with its GPD/productivity.

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#648

Post by emodendroket »

carlosdp wrote: post #218
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…

There was a quote recently from a high ranking former FBI agent that worked on money laundering where she said she wasn't really concerned about crypto making money laundering worse (trying to find the article again). Her reasoning was: "what people need to understand is, 95% of money laundering with fiat currency already succeeds today without getting caught." In other words, this won't really change much, it was al…

Money laundering is one problem; getting a large payment of cash is another, particularly if you're in the business of, say, demanding ransoms. This story was posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396804

Re: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

#649

Post by emodendroket »

tradertef wrote: post #636
Dzugaru wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be joking? There is a trivial way to hide the traces by using mixers. Why do you think ransomware and black markets today exclusively run crypto not fiat?

Most criminals are stupid and eventually get caught. Can you show an example of large-scale ransomware where criminal could convert Bitcoin into fiat currency? Most of them store Bitcoin and wait, probably realizing it is not easy to clean that bitcoin. This idea of using mixers is a myth.

Come on, many ransomware packages are quite sophisticated and the operation's run by organized criminals. We're not talking about people impulsively robbing a gas station.
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