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El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#81

Post by dougk16 »

dadoge wrote: post #4

Remittances, things like wire transfers, account for 22% of their GDP. Bitcoin will give that money back to the people with the way lower cost of transfers, esp through the Lightning Network that is planned to be widely used. Elizabeth Stark boldly said 7 yrs ago and Bitcoin is like TCP and needs an http, and then built Lightning on top of Bitcoin and this is super exciting to see. EDIT: removed “fees”, it’s just rem…

Good analogy with http. But keep going. After http people realized the importance of https. Sending credit card numbers and passwords in cleartext over the Internet was clearly a bad idea. So what is https in this analogy? Monero, PirateChain, Aeon, Wownero are the major contenders.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#83

Post by ArkanExplorer »

dadoge wrote: post #4

Remittances, things like wire transfers, account for 22% of their GDP. Bitcoin will give that money back to the people with the way lower cost of transfers, esp through the Lightning Network that is planned to be widely used. Elizabeth Stark boldly said 7 yrs ago and Bitcoin is like TCP and needs an http, and then built Lightning on top of Bitcoin and this is super exciting to see. EDIT: removed “fees”, it’s just rem…

Your Abuela isn't going to be able to take her .05 Btc down to the local Bodega and buy groceries.

El Salvador already uses the US Dollar as its official currency. A migrant worker in the USA is going to face a lot more fees, scams, and difficulty to buy and send BTC than just wiring the same currency he earns to to a relative who can then spend in the same currency.

This Bitcoin thing is a marketing ploy from the corrupt Salvadoran president, and an attempt to get a few crypto whales to move to the country and cash out, and buy real estate.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#84

Post by jiveturkey »

garydevenay wrote: post #10
pizza234 wrote: post #2

Two questions: - will those moves make the country a good location for laundering bitcoins? - generally speaking, is there no other way of profiting from surplus electricity (which essentially, this is)?

In the case of laundering Bitcoin— this seems to be a majorly misunderstood concept. Bitcoin transactions are completely transparent and observable by everyone who has an internet connection. Anyone (with an internet connection) can watch any wallet and observe any and all transactions. The notion of a country being a "good location for laundering bitcoins" doesn't really make sense, as Bitcoin are never in a locatio…

> this seems to be a majorly misunderstood concept.

By you as well!

1. Yes, they are transparent, however mixers are a thing.

2. The 2 things confounding mixers are KYC and volume. El Salvador, a country, is in a position to ignore KYC and thereby promote mixing (laundering as one of the benefits) under its jurisdiction. Now they just have to attract the volume. You could never get away with this in the US.

There's more to it than the bitcoin fundamentals. Laws do matter and they come into play by location.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#85

Post by throwawayffffas »

garydevenay wrote: post #59
StavrosK wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for the value of 1 BTC, it's value fluctuates if you operate on a base currency which is not BTC, but that is the same for any currency exchange. Yes but also, even though 1 BTC will always be worth 1 BTC, the amount of work it buys you won't be the same, as with any currency. In theory, you can also store USD for an infinite amount of time (assuming you exchange the paper for new paper when it decays), but it,…

> In theory, you can also store USD for an infinite amount of time This is actually not true, as 1 USD does not equal a static percentage of all USD. If you look at the stock-to-flow of storing value in USD compared to Bitcoin or even Gold, it's immediately apparent that USD or central bank backed fiat currency is an exceptionally inefficient way to store value as it's being debased at alarming rates. This is why $10…

I would point out that 1 BTC does not equal 1/21000000 of the total supply forever. For three main reasons a) wallet keys get lost making stored bitcoins unavailable. b) The developers/community may very well decide to change the total amount of bitcoins available in the future. c) With the rise of quantum computing it is conceivable that the public key encryption that is used to secure the wallets may be broken in the next few decades rendering bitcoin unusable.

EDIT: corrected public key, I had written "public/private" for some reason.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#87

Post by Tenoke »

dougk16 wrote: post #81
dadoge wrote: post #4

Remittances, things like wire transfers, account for 22% of their GDP. Bitcoin will give that money back to the people with the way lower cost of transfers, esp through the Lightning Network that is planned to be widely used. Elizabeth Stark boldly said 7 yrs ago and Bitcoin is like TCP and needs an http, and then built Lightning on top of Bitcoin and this is super exciting to see. EDIT: removed “fees”, it’s just rem…

Good analogy with http. But keep going. After http people realized the importance of https. Sending credit card numbers and passwords in cleartext over the Internet was clearly a bad idea. So what is https in this analogy? Monero, PirateChain, Aeon, Wownero are the major contenders.

Monero yes, the other 3 do not seem like all that serious contenders. LTC with mimblewimble would be a way better example.

Of smaller ones, SCRT which is a whole privacy-focused smartchain would be my other pick.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#88

Post by xwolfi »

enchiridion wrote: post #79

So, I'm going to choose to be an optimist when it comes to crypto energy consumption. There has literally never been a more direct reward for efficient energy production.

But it s like there's ONLY the reward. You imagine if there was a way to make gold with electricity? We d live in the dark just to get more of it...

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#89

Post by selsta »

ostenning wrote: post #18
dadoge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/tech... Nah. Bitcoin is actually a lot easier to trace than paper US Dollars.

Exactly, people who claim btc is anonymous don’t know what they are talking about. You can literally trace every transaction ever made, and given nearly all on-off ramps to fiat require KYC, btc itself is not the problem. The problem comes from privacy coins like Monero, which arguably should be outlawed (if not already)

> The problem comes from privacy coins like Monero, which arguably should be outlawed (if not already)

Are you also in favour of outlawing Tor, E2EE, HTTPS? I am always surprised that some people want privacy outlawed.

Disclaimer: Monero contributor

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#90

Post by xwolfi »

fasteo wrote: post #86
kasperni wrote: post #5

Every day, this is getting more and more ridiculous.

Tagging it as "ridiculous" calls for a minimal clarification

Like maybe there are more pressing problems than making bitcoin with this electricity supply. I dont know but it feels wasted on a fad.
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